Italian villas and their gardens;

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ITALIAN VILBAS

AND

THEIR GARDENS

BY

EDITH WHARTON

WITH PICT VRE S BY
MAXFIELD PARRISff «

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ITALIAN VILLAS AND
THEIR GARDENS

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VILLA CAMPI, NEAR FLORENCE

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ITALIAN VILLAS

AND THEIR GARDENS

BY

EDITH WHARTON

ILLUSTRATED WITH PICTrRKS BY

MAXFIELD TARRISH

AM) BY PIIOTOr.RAPHS

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NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.

1905

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Copyright, 1903, 1904, by
The Century Co.

Published November, igo4

THE D= VINNE PRESS

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URL

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TO

VERNON LEE

WHO, BETTER THAN ANY ONE ELSE, HAS UNDERSTOOD

AND INTERPRETED THE GARDEN-MAGIC

OF ITALY

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION 5

I
FLORENTINE VILLAS 19

II
SIENESE VILLAS 63

III
ROMAN VILLAS 81

IV

VILLAS NEAR ROME

I Caprarola and Lante 127

II Villa d'Este 139

III Frascati 148

V
GENOESE VILLAS 173

VI
LOMBARD VILLAS 197

VII

VILLAS OF VENETIA 231

vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAOF.

Villa Campi, near Florence Frontispiece

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

The Reservoir, Villa Falconieri, Frascati 4

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

The Cascade, Villa Torlonia, Frascati 9

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Fountain of Venus, Villa Petraja, Florence 18

From a Photograph.

Villa Gamberaia at Settignano, near F"lorence 20

Drawn by C. A. Vanderhoof, from a Photograph.

Boboli Garden, Florence 24

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Entrance to Upper Garden, Boboli Garden, Florence .... 27

From a Photograph.

Cypress Alley, Boboli Garden, Florence 31

From a Photograph.

Ilex-walk, Boboli Garden, Florence ... 36

From a Photograph.

Villa Gamberaia, near Florence 39

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

View of Amphitheatre, Boboli Garden, Florence 44

From a Photograph.

Villa Corsini, Florence 49

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Vicobello, Siena 62

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

ix

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

La Palazzina (Villa Gori), Siena 67

Drawn by Maxfield Parrisli.

The Theatre at La Palazzina, Siena 73

Drawn by MaxfieUl Parrish.

The Dome of St. Peter's, from the Vatican Gardens .... 80

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Entrance to Forecourt, Villa Borghese, Rome 87

From a Photograph.

Grotto, Villa di Papa Giulio, Rome 91

From a Photograph.

Temple of .^Esculapius, Villa Borghese, Rome 96

From a Photograph.

Villa Medici, Rome 100

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Courtyard Gate of the Villa Pia, Vatican Gardens 102

Drawn by E. Denison, from a Photograph.

Villa Pia — In the Gardens of the Vatican 105

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Gateway of the Villa Borghese 108

Drawn by E. Denison, from a Photograph.

Villa Chigi, Rome in

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Parterres on Terrace, Villa Belrespiro (Pamphily-Doria), Rome . 116

From a Photograph.

View from Lower Garden, Villa Belrespiro (Pamphily-Doria),

Rome 121

From a Photograph.

Villa d'Este, Tivoli 126

Draw-n by Maxfield Parrish.

Villa Caprarola 129

From a retouched Photograph.

The Casino, Villa Farnese, Caprarola 133

From a Photograph.

Villa Lante, Bagnaia 138

From a Photograph.

X

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

The Pool, Villa d'Este, Tivoli 141

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Villa Lante, Bagnaia 145

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Cascade and Rotunda, Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati .... 149

From a Pliotograph.

Garden of Villa Lancellotti, Frascati 153

From a Pliotograph.

Casino, Villa Falconieri, Frascati 157

From a Photograph.

The Entrance, Villa Falconieri, Frascati 161

From a Photograph.

Villa Lancellotti, Frascati i5r

From a Photograph.

Villa Scassi, Genoa 172

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

A Garden-niche, Villa Scassi, Genoa ........ 181

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Villa Cicogna, Bisuschio jg5

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Villa Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore 20^

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

In the Gardens of Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore 210

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Villa Cicogna, from the Terrace above the House 216

From a Photograph.

Villa Pliniana, Lake Como 221

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Iron Gates of the Villa Alario (now Visconti di Saliceto) . . . 224

Drawn by E. Denison, from a Photograph.

Railing of the Villa Alario 225

Drawn by Malcolm Fraser, from a Photograph.

Gateway of the Botanic Garden, Padua 230

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

xi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

View at Val San Zibio, near Battaglia 235

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Plan of the Botanic Garden, Padua 239

Drawn by E. Denison, from Sketch by the Author.

Val San Zibio, near Battaglia 241

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Gateway, Villa Pisani, Stra 244

Drawn by E. Denison, from a Photograph.

Villa Valmarana, Vicenza 247

Drawn by Maxfield Parrish.

Ml

ITALIAN VILLAS AND
THEIR GARDENS

THE RESERVOIR, VILLA FALCONIERI, FRASCATI

ITALIAN VILLAS AND
THEIR GARDENS

INTRODUCTION

ITALIAN GARDEN-MAGIC

THOUGH it is an exaggeration to say that there
are no flowers in ItaHan gardens, yetto enjoy and
appreciate the ItaHan garden-craft one must
always bear in mind that it is independent gf floriculture.
The Italian garden does not exist for its flowers ;
its flowers exist for it: they are a late and infrequent
adjunct to its beauties, a parenthetical grace counting
only as one more touch in the general effect of en-
chantment. This is no doubt partly explained by the
difficulty of cultivating any but spring flowers in so hot
and dry a climate, and the result has been a wonderful
development of the more permanent effects to be ob-
tained from the three other factors in garden-composi-
tion— marble, water and perennial verdure — and the
achievement, by their skilful blending, of a charm inde-
pendent of the seasons.

It is hard to explain to the modern garden-lover,

5

ITALIAN VILLAS

whose whole conception of the charm of gardens is formed
of successive pictures of flower-lovehness, how this effect
of enchantment can be produced by anything so dull
and monotonous as a mere combination of clipped green
and stone-work.

The traveller returning from Italy, with his eyes and
imagination full of the ineffable Italian garden-magic,
knows vaguely that the enchantment exists ; that he has
been under its spell, and that it is more potent, more
enduring, more intoxicating to every sense than the
most elaborate and glowing effects of modern horticul-
ture ; but he may not have found the key to the mys-
tery. Is it because the sky is bluer, because the vege-
tation is more luxuriant? Our midsummer skies are
almost as deep, our foliage is as rich, and perhaps more
varied ; there are, indeed, not a few resemblances be-
tween the North American summer climate and that of
Italy in spring and autumn.

Some of those who have fallen under the spell are
inclined to ascribe the Italian garden-magic to the effect
of time ; but, wonder-working as this undoubtedly is, it
leaves many beauties unaccounted for. To seek the
answer one must go deeper : the garden must be studied
in relation to the house, and both in relation to the land-
scape. The garden of the Middle Ages, the garden one
sees in old missal illuminations and in early woodcuts,
was a mere patch of ground within the castle precincts,
where "simples" were grown around a central well-

6

ITALIAN GARDEN-MAGIC

head and fruit was espaliered against the walls. But
in the rapid flowering of Italian civilization the castle
walls were soon thrown down, and the garden expanded,
taking in the fish-pond, the bowling-green, the rose-
arbour and the clipped walk. The Italian country house,
especially in the centre and the south of Italy, was
almost always built on a hillside, and one day the
architect looked forth from the terrace of his villa, and
saw that, in his survey of the garden, the enclosing
landscape was naturally included : the two formed a
part of the same composition.

The recognition of this fact was the first step in the
development of the great garden-art of the Renaissance:
the next was the architect's discovery of the means by
which nature and art might be fused in his picture. He
had now three problems to deal with : his garden must be
adapted to the architectural lines of the house it adjoined;
it must be adapted to the requirements of the inmates of
the house, in the sense of providing shady walks, sunny
bowling-greens, parterres and orchards, all conveniently
accessible ; and lastly it must be adapted to the land-
scape around it. At no time and in no country has this
triple problem been so successfully dealt with as in the
treatment of the Italian country house from the begin-
ning of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury ; and in the blending of different elements, the
subtle transition from the fixed and formal lines of art
to the shifting and irregular lines of nature, and lastly

7

ITALIAN VILLAS

in the essential convenience and livableness of the gar-
den, lies the fundamental secret of the old garden-magic.

However much other factors may contribute to the
total impression of charm, yet by eliminating them one
after another, by thinking away the flowers, the sunlight,
the rich tinting of time, one finds that, underlying all
these, there is the deeper harmony of design which is
independent of any adventitious effects. This does not
imply that a plan of an Italian garden is as beautiful as
the garden itself. The more permanent materials of
which the latter is made — the stonework, the evergreen
foliage, the effects of rushing or motionless water, above
all the lines of the natural scenery — all form a part of
the artist's design. But these things are as beautiful at
one season as at another ; and even these are but the
accessories of the fundamental plan. The inherent
beauty of the garden lies in the grouping of its parts —
in the converging lines of its long ilex-walks, the alter-
nation of sunny open spaces with cool woodland shade,
the proportion between terrace and bowling-green, or
between the height of a wall and the width of a path.
None of these details was negligible to the landscape-
architect of the Renaissance : he considered the distri-
bution of shade and sunlight, of straight lines of masonry
and rippled lines of foliage, as carefully as he weighed
the relation of his whole composition to the scene
about it.

Then, again, any one who studies the old Italian

S

THE CASCADE, VILLA TORLONJA, FRASCATI

ITALIAN GARDKN-MAGIC

gardens will be struck with the way in which the archi-
tect broadened and simplified his plan if it faced a
grandiose landscape. Intricacy of detail, complicated
groupings of terraces, fountains, labyrinths and porti-
coes, are found in sites where there is no great sweep
of landscape attuning the eye to larger impressions.
The farther north one goes, the less grand the land-
scape becomes and the more elaborate the garden. The
great pleasure-grounds overlooking the Roman Cam-
pagna are laid out on severe and majestic lines : the
parts are few ; the total effect is one of breadth and
simplicity.

It is because, in the modern revival of gardening, so
little attention has been paid to these first principles of
the art that the garden-lover should not content himself
with a vague enjoyment of old Italian gardens, but
should try to extract from them principles which may
be applied at home. He should observe, for instance,
that the old Italian garden was meant to be lived in —
a use to which, at least in America, the modern garden
is seldom put. He should note that, to this end, the
grounds were as carefully and conveniently planned as
the house, with broad paths (in which two or more
could go abreast) leading from one division to another ;
with shade easily accessible from the house, as well as
a sunny sheltered walk for winter ; and with effective
transitions from the dusk of wooded alleys to open
flowery spaces or to the level sward of the bowling-

I 1

ITALIAN VILLAS

green. He should remember that the terraces and
formal gardens adjoined the house, that the ilex or
laurel walks beyond were clipped into shape to effect a
transition between the straight lines of masonry and the
untrimmed growth of the woodland to which they led,
and that each step away from architecture was a nearer
approach to nature.

The cult of the Italian garden has spread from Eng-
land to America, and there is a general feeling that, by
placing a marble bench here and a sun-dial there, Italian
" effects " may be achieved. The results produced,
even where much money and thought have been ex-
pended, are not altogether satisfactory ; and some critics
have thence inferred that the Italian garden is, so to
speak, tintranslatable, that it cannot be adequately ren-
dered in another landscape and another age.

Certain effects, those which depend on architectural
grandeur as well as those due to colouring and age, are
no doubt unattainable ; but there is, none the less, much
to be learned from the old Italian gardens, and the first
lesson is that, if they are to be a real inspiration, they
must be copied, not in the letter but in the spirit. That
is, a marble sarcophagus and a dozen twisted columns
wull not make an Italian garden ; but a piece of ground
laid out and planted on the principles of the old garden-
craft will be, not indeed an Italian garden in the literal
sense, but, what is far better, a garden as well adapted
to its siirroimdings as were the models which inspired if.

12

ITALIAN GARDEN-MAGIC

This is the secret to be learned from the villas of
Italy ; and no one who has looked at them with this
object in view will be content to relapse into vague ad-
miration of their loveliness. As Brownmg, in passing
Cape St. Vincent and Trafalgar Bay, cried out :

" Here and here did England help me : how can I help
England ? " — say,

SO the garden-lover, who longs to transfer something
of the old garden-magic to his own patch of ground at
home, will ask himself, in wandering under the umbrella-
pines of the Villa Borghese, or through the box-par-
terres of the Villa Lante : What can I bring away from
here ? And the more he studies and compares, the
more inevitably will the answer be : " Not this or that
amputated statue, or broken bas-relief, or fragmentary
effect of any sort, but a sense of the informing spirit —
an understanding of the gardener's purpose, and of the
uses to which he meant his garden to be put."

13

FLORENTINE VILLAS

FOUNTAIN OF VENUS, VILLA PETRAJA, FLORENCE

FLORENTINE VILLAS

FOR centuries Florence has been celebrated for
her villa-clad hills. According to an old chron-
icler, the country houses were more splendid
than those in the town, and stood so close-set among
their olive-orchards and vineyards that the traveller
"thought himself in Florence three leagues before
reaching the city."

Many of these houses still survive, strongly planted
on their broad terraces, from the fifteenth-century farm-
house-villa, with its projecting eaves and square tower,
to the many-windowed maison de plaisance in which
the luxurious nobles of the seventeenth century spent
the gambling and chocolate-drinking weeks of the vin-
tage season. It is characteristic of Florentine thrift and
conservatism that the greater number of these later and
more pretentious villas are merely additions to the plain
old buildings, while, even in the rare cases where the
whole structure is new, the baroque exuberance which
became fashionable in the seventeenth century is tem-
pered by a restraint and severity peculiarly Tuscan.
So numerous and well preserved are the buildings

19

ITALIAN VILLAS

of this order about Florence that the student who should
attempt to give an account of them would have before
him a long and laborious undertaking; but where the
villa is to be considered in relation to its garden, the
task is reduced to narrow limits. There is perhaps no
region of Italy so rich in old villas and so lacking in old

"^1 ■ '-..irWft.T-'

VILLA GAMBERAIA, AT SETTIGNANO, NEAR FLORENCE

gardens as the neighbourhood of Florence. Various
causes have brought about this result. The environs
of Florence have always been frequented by the wealthy
classes, not only Italian but foreign. The Tuscan
nobility have usually been rich enough to alter their
gardens in accordance with the varying horticultural

20

FLORKN'lINE VILLAS

fashions imported from England and France ; and the
Hnghsh who have colonized in such numbers the slopes
above the Arno have contributed not a little to the
destruction of the old gardens by introducing into their
horticultural plans two features entirely alien to the
Tuscan climate and soil, namely, lawns and deciduous
shade-trees.

Many indeed are the parterres and terraces which
have disappeared before the Britannic craving for a
lawn, many the olive-orchards and vineyards which
must have given way to the thinly dotted " specimen
trees " so dear to the English landscape-gardener, who
is still, with rare exceptions, the slave of his famous
eighteenth-century predecessors, Repton and " Capa-
bility Brown," as the English architect is still the de-
scendant of Pugin and the Gothic revival. This
Anglicization of the Tuscan garden did not, of course,
come only from direct English influence. The jardin
anglais was fashionable in France when Marie Antoi-
nette laid out the Petit Trianon, and Herr Tuckermann,
in his book on Italian gardens, propounds a theory, for
which he gives no very clear reasons, to the effect that
the naturalistic school of gardening actually originated
in Italy, in the Borghese gardens in Rome, which he
supposes to have been laid out more or less in their
present form by Giovanni Fontana, as early as the first
quarter of the seventeenth century.

It is certain, at any rate, that the Florentines adopted

21

ITALIAN VILLAS

the new fashion early in the nineteenth century, as is
shown — to give but one instance — in the vast Torri-
giani gardens, near the Porta Romana, laid out by the
Marchese Torrigiani about 1830 in the most approved
"landscape" style, with an almost complete neglect of
the characteristic Tuscan vegetation and a correspond-
ing disregard of Italian climate and habits. The large
English colony has, however, undoubtedly done much
to encourage, even in the present day, the alteration of
the old gardens and the introduction of alien vegetation
in those which have been partly preserved. It is, for
instance, typical of the old Tuscan villa that the farm,
ox pod ere, should come up to the edge of the terrace on
which the house stands ; but in most cases where old
villas have been bought by foreigners, the vineyards
and olive-orchards near the house have been turned
into lawns dotted with plantations of exotic trees.
Under these circumstances it is not surprising that but
few unaltered gardens are to be found near Florence.
To learn what the old Tuscan garden was, one must
search the environs of the smaller towns, and there are
more interesting examples about Siena than in the whole
circuit of the Florentine hills.

The old Italian architects distinguished two classes
of country houses : the villa suburbana, or iiiaison de
plaisance (literally the pleasure-house), standing within
or just without the city walls, surrounded by pleasure-
grounds and built for a few weeks' residence ; and the

22

BOBOLI GARDEN, FLORENCE

FLORENTINE VILLAS

country house, which is an expansion of the old farm,
and stands generally farther out of town, among its
fields and vineyards — the seat of the country gentleman
living on his estates. The Italian pleasure-garden did
not reach its full development till the middle of the six-
teenth century, and doubtless many of the old Floren-
tine villas, the semi-castle and the quasi-farm of the
fourteenth century, stood as they do now, on a bare
terrace among the vines, with a small walled enclosure
for the cultivation of herbs and vegetables. But of the
period in which the garden began to be a studied archi-
tectural extension of the house, few examples are to be
found near Florence.

The most important, if not the most pleasing, of
Tuscan pleasure-gardens lies, however, within the city
walls. This is the Boboli garden, laid out on the steep
hillside behind the Pitti Palace. The plan of the Boboli
garden is not only magnificent in itself, but interesting
as one of the rare examples, in Tuscany, of a Renais-
sance garden still undisturbed in its main outlines.
Eleonora de' Medici, who purchased the Pitti Palace in
1549, soon afterward acquired the neighbouring ground,
and the garden was laid out by II Tribolo, continued by
Buontalenti, and completed by Bartolommeo Ammanati,
to whom is also due the garden facade of the palace.
The scheme of the garden is worthy of careful study,
though in many respects the effect it now produces is
far less impressive than its designers intended. Prob-

25

ITALIAN VILLAS

ably no grounds of equal grandeur and extent have less
of that peculiar magic which one associates with the old
Italian garden — a fact doubtless due less to defects of
composition than to later changes in the details of plant-
ing and decoration. Still, the main outline remains and
is full of instruction to the garden-lover.

The palace is built against the steep hillside, which
is dug out to receive it, a high retaining-wall being built
far enough back from the central body of the house to
allow the latter to stand free. The ground floor of the
palace is so far below ground that its windows look
across a paved court at the face of the retaining-wall,
which Ammanati decorated with an architectural com-
position representing a grotto, from which water was
meant to gush as though issuing from the hillside. This
grotto he surmounted with a magnificent fountain, stand-
ing on a level with the first-floor windows of the palace
and with the surrounding gardens. The arrangement
shows ingenuity in overcoming a technical difficulty,
and the effect, from the garden, is very successful,
though the well-like court makes an unfortunate gap
between the house and its grounds.

Behind the fountain, and in a line with it, a horseshoe-
shaped amphitheatre has been cut out of the hillside,
surrounded by tiers of stone seats adorned with statues
in niches and backed by clipped laurel hedges, behind
which rise the ilex-clad slopes of the upper gardens.
This amphitheatre is one of the triumphs of Italian

26

ENTRANCE TO UPPER GARDEN. BOBOLl GARDEN. FLORENCE

FLORKNTINK VILLAS

garden-architecture. In general design and detail it
belongs to the pure Renaissance, without trace of the
heavy and fantastic barrochismo which, half a century
later, began to disfigure such compositions in the villas
near Rome. Indeed, comparison with the grotesque
garden-architecture of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, which
is but little later in date, shows how long the Tuscan
sense of proportion and refinement of taste resisted the
ever-growing desire to astonish instead of charming the
spectator.

On each side of the amphitheatre, clipped ilex-walks
climb the hill, coming out some distance above on a
plateau containing the toy lake with its little island, the
Isola Bella, which was once the pride of the Boboli
garden. This portion of the grounds has been so
stripped of its architectural adornments and of its sur-
rounding vegetation that it is now merely forlorn ; and
the same may be said of the little upper garden, reached
by an imposing flight of steps and commanding a wide
view over Florence. One must revert to the architect's
plan to see how admirably adapted it was to the difficul-
ties of the site he had to deal with, and how skilfully he
harmonized the dense shade of his ilex-groves with the
great open spaces and pompous architectural effects
necessary in a garden which was to form a worthy set-
ting for the pageants of a Renaissance court. It is
interesting to note in this connection that the flower-
garden, or gianiino segrefo, which in Renaissance gar-

29

ITALIAN VILLAS

dens almost invariably adjoins the house, has here been
relegated to the hilltop, doubtless because the only level
space near the palace was required for state ceremonials
and theatrical entertainments rather than for private
enjoyment.

It is pardy because the Boboli is a court-garden, and
not designed for private use, that it is less interesting
and instructive than many others of less importance.
Yet the other Medicean villas near Florence, though
designed on much simpler lines, have the same lack of
personal charm. It is perhaps owing to the fact that
Florence was so long under the dominion of one all-
powerful family that there is so litde variety in her
pleasure-houses. Pratolino, Poggio a Caiano, Cafag-
giuolo, Careggi, Castello and Petraia, one and all,
whatever their origin, soon passed into the possessor-
ship of the Medici, and thence into that of the Austrian
grand dukes who succeeded them ; and of the three
whose gardens have been partly preserved, Castello,
Petraia and Poggio Imperiale, it may be said that they
have the same impersonal official look as the Boboli.

Castello and Petraia, situated a mile apart beyond the
village of Quarto, were both built by Buontalenti, that
brilliant pupil of Ammanati's who had a share in the
planning of the gardens behind the Pitti. Castello
stands on level ground, and its severely plain fagade,
with windows on consoles and rusticated doorway, faces
what is now a highway, though, according to the print

30

CYPRESS ALLEY, BOBOLI GARDEN. FLORENCE

FLORENTINE VILLAS

of Zocchi, the eighteenth-century engraver, a semicir-
cular space enclosed in a low wall once extended be-
tween the house and the road, as at the neighbouring
Villa Corsini and at Poggio Imperiale. It was an ad-
mirable rule of the old Italian architects, where the
garden-space was small and where the site permitted,
to build their villas facing the road, so that the full ex-
tent of the grounds was secured to the private use of
the inmates, instead of being laid open by a public ap-
proach to the house. This rule is still followed by
French villa-architects, and it is exceptional in France
to see a villa entered from its grounds when it may be
approached directly from the highroad.

Behind Castello the ground rises in terraces, enclosed
in lateral walls, to a high retaining-wall at the back,
surmounted by a wood of ilexes which contains a pool
with an island. Montaigne, who describes but (ew
gardens in his Italian diary, mentions that the terraces
of Castello are en pante (sic) ; that is, they incline gradu-
ally toward the house, with the slope of the ground.
This bold and unusual adaptation of formal gardening
to the natural exigencies of the site is also seen in the
terraced gardens of the beautiful Villa Imperiali (now
Scassi) at Sampierdarena, near Genoa. The plan of
the garden at Castello is admirable, but in detail it has
been modernized at the cost of all its charm. Wide
steps lead up to the first terrace, where II Tribolo's
stately fountain of bronze and marble stands surrounded

IIALIAN VILLAS

by marble benches and statues on fine rusticated ped-
estals. Unhappily, fountain and statues have lately
been scrubbed to preternatural whiteness, and the same
spirit of improvement has turned the old parterres into
sunburnt turf, and dotted it with copper beeches and
pampas-grass. Montaigne alludes to the berceanx, or
pleached walks, and to the close-set cypresses which
made a delicious coolness in this garden ; and as one
looks across its sun-scorched expanse one perceives that
its lack of charm is explained by lack of shade.

As is usual in Italian gardens built against a hillside,
the retaining-wall at the back serves for the great dec-
orative motive at Castello. It is reached by wide
marble steps, and flanked at the sides by symmetrical
lemon-houses. On the central axis of the garden, the
w^all has a wide opening between columns, and on each
side an arched recess, equidistant between the lemon-
houses and the central opening. Within the latter is
one of those huge grottoes' which for two centuries or
more were the delight of Italian garden-architects.
The roof is decorated with masks and arabesques in
coloured shell-work, and in the niches of the tufa of
which the background is formed are strange groups of
life-sized animals, a camel, a monkey, a stag with real
antlers, a wild boar with real tusks, and various small
animals and birds, some made of coloured marbles which
correspond with their natural tints ; while beneath these

■ This grotto and its sculptures are the work of U Tribolo, who also built
the aqueduct bringing thither the waters of the Arno and the Mugnone.

34

ILEX-WALK. BOBOLI GARDEN. FLORENCE

FLORENTINE VILLAS

groups are basins of pink-and-white marble, carved
with sea-creatures and resting on dolphins. Humour is
the quality which soonest loses its savour, and it is often
difficult to understand the grotesque side of the old gar-
den-architecture ; but the curious delight in the repre-
sentations of animals, real or fantastic, probably arose
from the general interest in those strange wild beasts
of which the travellers of the Renaissance brought home
such fabulous descriptions. As to the general use of
the grotto in Italian gardens, it is a natural develop-
ment of the need for shade and coolness, and when the
long-disused waterworks were playing, and cool streams
gushed over quivering beds of fern into the marble
tanks, these retreats must have formed a delicious con-
trast to the outer glare of the garden.

At Petraia the gardens are less elaborate in plan than
at Castello, and are, in fact, noted chiefly for a fountain
brought from that villa. This fountain, the most beau-
tiful of II Tribolo's works, is surmounted by the famous
Venus-like figure of a woman wringing out her hair,
now generally attributed to Giovanni da Bologna. Like
the other Florentine villas of this quarter, where water
is more abundant, Petraia has a great oblong vasca, or
tank, beneath its upper terrace ; while the house itself,
a simple structure of the old-fashioned Tuscan type,
built about an inner quadrangle, is remarkable for its very
beautiful tower, which, as Herr Gurlitt' suggests, was
doubtless inspired by the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio.

'" Geschichte des Barockstils in Italien."

37

ITALIAN VILLAS

According to Zocchi's charming etching, the ducal
villa of Poggio Imperiale, on a hillside to the south of
Florence, still preserved, in the eighteenth century, its
simple and characteristic Tuscan fagade. This was
concealed by the Grand Duke Peter Leopold behind a
heavy pillared front, to which the rusticated porticoes
were added later ; and externally nothing remains as it
was save the ilex and cypress avenue, now a public
highway, which ascends to the villa from the Porta
Romana, and the semicircular entrance -court with its
guardian statues on mighty pedestals.

Poggio Imperiale was for too long the favourite resi-
dence of the grand-ducal Medici, and of their successors
of Lorraine, not to suffer many changes, and to lose,
one by one, all its most typical features. Within there
is a fine court surrounded by an open arcade, probably
due to Giulio Parigi, who, at the end of the sixteenth
century, completed the alterations of the villa according
to the plans of Giuliano da Sangallo ; and the vast suites
of rooms are interesting to the student of decoration,
since they are adorned, probably by French artists, with
exquisite carvings and shiccJii of the Louis XX'' and
Louis XVI periods. But the grounds have kept little
besides their general plan. At the back, the villa opens
directly on a large level pleasure-garden, with enclosing
walls and a central basin surrounded by statues ; but
the geometrical parterres have been turned into a lawn.
To the right of this level space, a few steps lead down

38

VIl-LA GAMBERAIA, NEAR FLORENCE

FLORENTINE VILLAS

to a long terrace planted with ilexes, whence there is a
fine view over Florence — an unusual arrangement, as
the bosco was generally above, not below, the flower-
garden.

If, owing to circumstances, the more famous pleasure-
grounds of Florence have lost much of their antique
charm, she has happily preserved a garden of another
sort which possesses to an unusual degree the flavour of
the past. This is the villa of the Gamberaia at Setti-
gnano. Till its recent purchase, the Gamberaia had for
many years been let out in lodgings for the summer,
and it doubtless owes to this obscure fate the complete
preservation of its garden-plan. Before the recent alter-
ations made in its gardens, it w^as doubly interesting
from its unchanged condition, and from the fact that,
even in Italy, where small and irregular pieces of ground
were so often utilized with marvellous skill, it was prob-
ably the most perfect example of the art of producing a
great effect on a small scale.

The villa stands nobly on a ridge overlooking the
village of Settignano and the wide-spread valley of the
Arno. The house is small yet impressive. Though
presumably built as late as 1610, it shows few conces-
sions to the baroque style already prevalent in other
parts of Italy, and is yet equally removed from the
classic or Palladian manner which held its own so long
in the Venetian country. The Gamberaia is distinctly
Tuscan, and its projecting eaves, heavily coigned angles

41

ITALIAN VILLAS

and windows set far apart on massive consoles, show its
direct descent from the severe and sober school of six-
teenth-century architects who produced such noble
examples of the great Tuscan villa as I Collazzi and
Fonte air Erta. Nevertheless, so well proportioned is
its elevation that there is no sense of heaviness, and the
solidity of the main building is relieved by a kind of
flying arcade at each end, one of which connects the
house with its chapel, while the other, by means of a
spiral stairway in a pier of the arcade, leads from the
first floor to what was once the old fish-pond and herb-
garden. This garden, an oblong piece of ground, a
few years ago had in its centre a round fish-pond, sur-
rounded by symmetrical plots planted with roses and
vegetables, and in general design had probably been
little changed since the construction of the villa. It has
now been remodelled on an elaborate plan, w^hich has the
disadvantage of being unrelated in style to its surround-
ings ; but fortunately no other change has been made in
the plan and planting of the grounds.

Before the fagade of the house a grassy terrace
bounded by a low wall, set alternately with stone vases
and solemn-looking stone dogs, overhangs the vine-
yards and fields, which, as in all unaltered Tuscan
country places, come up close to the house. Behind
the villa, and running parallel with it, is a long grass
alley or bowling-green, flanked for part of its length by
a lofty retaining-wall set with statues, and for the

42

VIEW OF AMPHITHEATRE, BOBOI,I GARDEN, iluklNl.]-.

FLORENTINE VILLAS

remainder by high hedges which divide it on one side
from the fish-pond garden and on the other from the
farm. The green is closed at one end by a grotto of
coloured pebbles and shells, with nymphs and shepherds
in niches about a fountain. This grotto is overhung by
the grove of ancient cypresses for which the Gamberaia
is noted. At its opposite end the bowling-green termi-
nates in a balustrade whence one looks down on the
Arno and across to the hills on the southern side of the
valley.

The retaining-wall which runs parallel with the back
of the house sustains a terrace planted with cypress and
ilex. This terraced wood above the house is very
typical of Italian gardens : good examples may be seen
at Castello and at the Villa Medici in Rome. These
patches of shade, however small, are planted irregularly,
like a wild wood, with stone seats under the dense ilex
boughs, and a statue placed here and there in a deep
niche of foliage. Just opposite the central doorway of
the house the retaining-wall is broken, and an iron gate
leads to a slit of a garden, hardly more than twenty feet
wide, on a level with the bowling-green. This narrow
strip ends also in a grotto-like fountain with statues,
and on each side balustraded flights of steps lead to the
upper level ori which the ilex-grove is planted. This
grove, however, occupies only one portion of the terrace.
On the other side of the cleft formed by the little grotto-
garden, the corresponding terrace, formerly laid out as

45

ITALIAN VILLAS

a vegetable-garden, is backed by the low facade of the
lemon-house, or stanzone, which is an adjunct of every
Italian villa. Here the lemon and orange trees, the
camellias and other semi-tender shrubs, are stored in
winter, to be set out in May in their red earthen jars on
the stone slabs which border the walks of all old Italian
gardens.

The plan of the Gamberaia has been described thus
in detail because it combines in an astonishingly small
space, yet without the least sense of overcrowding,
almost every typical excellence of the old Italian garden:
free circulation of sunlight and air about the house ;
abundance of water ; easy access to dense shade ; shel-
tered walks with different points of view ; variety of
effect produced by the skilful use of different levels ;
and, finally, breadth and simplicity of composition.

Here, also, may be noted in its fullest expression that
principle of old gardening which the modern " land-
scapist " has most completely unlearned, namely, the
value of subdivision of spaces. Whereas the modern
gardener's one idea of producing an effect of space is to
annihilate his boundaries, and not only to merge into
one another the necessary divisions of the garden, but
also to blend this vague whole with the landscape, the
old garden-architect proceeded on the opposite principle,
arguing that, as the garden is but the prolongation of
the house, and as a house containinor a sinQle husfe
room would be less interesting and less serviceable than

46

FLORENTINE VILLAS

one divided according to the varied requirements of its
inmates, so a garden which is merely one huge outdoor
room is also less interesting and less serviceable than
one which has its logical divisions. Utility was doubt-
less not the only consideration which produced this
careful portioning off of the garden. Esthetic im-
pressions were considered, and the effect of passing
from the sunny fruit- garden to the dense grove, thence
to the wide-reaching view, and again to the sheltered
privacy of the pleached walk or the mossy coolness of
the grotto — all this was taken into account by a race of
artists who studied the contrast of aesthetic emotions as
keenly as they did the juxtaposition of dark cypress and
pale lemon-tree, of deep shade and level sunlight. But
the real value of the old Italian garden-plan is that logic
and beauty meet in it, as they should in all sound
architectural work. Each quarter of the garden was
placed where convenience required, and w^as made
accessible from all the others by the most direct and
rational means ; and from this intelligent method of
planning the most varying effects of unexpectedness
and beauty were obtained.

It was said above that lawns are unsuited to the
Italian soil and climate, but it must not be thought that
the Italian gardeners did not appreciate the value of
turf They used it, but sparingly, knowing that it re-
quired great care and was not a characteristic of the
soil. The bowling-green of the Gamberaia shows how

47

ITALIAN VI LLAS

well the beauty of a long stretch of greensward was
understood ; and at the Villa Capponi, at Arcetri, on
the other side of Florence, there is a fine oblong of old
turf adjoining the house, said to be the only surviving
fragment of the original garden. These bits of sward
were always used near the house, where their full value
could be enjoyed, and were set like jewels in clipped
hedges or statue-crowned walls. Though doubtless
intended chiefly for games, they were certainly valued
for their aesthetic effect, for in many Italian gardens
steep grass alleys flanked by walls of beech or ilex are
seen ascending a hillside to the temple or statue which
forms the crowning ornament of the grounds. In
Florence a good example of this tapis vert, of which
Le Notre afterward made such admirable use in the
moist climate of France, is seen at the Villa Danti, on
the Arno near Campiobbi.

Close to the ducal villas of Castello lies a country-
seat possessing much of the intimate charm which they
lack. This is Prince Corsini's villa, the finest example
of a baroque country house near Florence. The old
villa, of which the typical Tuscan elevation may still be
seen at the back, was remodelled during the latter half
of the seventeenth century, probably by Antonio Ferri,
who built the state saloon and staircase of the Palazzo
Corsini on the Lungarno. The Villa Corsini lies in the
plain, like Castello, and has before it the usual walled
semicircle. The front of the villa is frankly baroque, a

48

VILLA CORSINI, FLORENCE

FLORENTINK VH.LAS

two-storied elevation with windows divided by a meagre
order, and a stately central gable flanked by balustrades
surmounted by vases. The whole treatment is inter-
esting, as showing the manner in which the seventeenth-
century architect overlaid a plain Tuscan structure with
florid ornament ; and the effect, if open to criticism, is
at once gay and stately.

The house is built about a quadrangle enclosed in an
open arcade on columns. Opposite the porte-cochere
is a doorway opening on a broad space bounded by a
balustrade with statues. An ilex avenue extends be-
yond this space, on the axis of the doorway. At one
end of the house is the oblong walled garden, with its
box-edged flower-beds grouped in an intricate geomet-
rical pattern about a central fountain. Corresponding
,. with this garden, at the opposite end of the house, is a
dense ilex-grove with an alley leading down the centre
to a beautiful fountain, a tank surmounted by a kind of
voluted pediment, into which the water falls from a
large ilex-shaded tank on a higher level. Here again
the vineyards and olive-orchards come up close to the
formal grounds, the ilex-grove being divided from the
podere by a line of cypresses instead of a wall.

Not far from the Gamberaia, on the hillside of San
Gervasio, stands another country house which preserves
only faint traces of its old gardens, but which, architec-
turally, is too interesting to be overlooked. This is the
villa of Fonte all' Erta. Originally a long building of

51

ITALIAN VILLAS

the villa-farmhouse order, with chapel, offices and out-
houses connected with the main house, it was trans-
formed in the sixteenth century, probably by Ammanati,
into one of the stateliest country houses near Florence.
A splendid rusticated loggia, approached by a double
flight of steps, forms an angle of the main house, and
either then or later the spacious open court, around
three sides of which the villa is built, was roofed over
and turned into a great central saloon like those of the
Venetian and Milanese villas. This two-storied saloon
is the finest and most appropriate feature of the interior
planning of Italian villas, but it seems never to have
been as popular in Tuscany as it was farther north or
south. The Tuscan villas, for the most part, are smaller
and less pretentious in style than those erected in other
parts of Italy, and only in exceptional instances did the
architect free himself from the traditional plan of the old
farmhouse-villa around its open court. A fine example
of this arcaded court may be seen at Petraia, the Medi-
cean villa near Castello. At Fonte all' Erta the former
court faced toward what was once an old flower-garden,
raised a few feet above the grass terrace which runs
the length of the facade. Behind this garden, and
adjoining the back of the villa, is the old evergreen
grove ; but the formal surroundings of the house have
disappeared.

The most splendid and stately villa in the neighbour-
hood of Florence stands among the hills a few miles

52

FLORENTINE VILLAS

beyond the Certosa of Val d'Ema, and looks from its
lofty ridge across the plain toward Pistoia and the
Apennines. This villa, called Ai Collazzi (now Bom-
bicci), from the wooded hills which surround it, was
built for the Dini family in the sixteenth century, and,
as tradition avers, by no less a hand than Michelangelo's.
He is known to have been a close friend of the Dini,
and is likely to have worked for them ; and if, as some
experts think, certain details of the design, as well as the
actual construction of the villa, are due to Santi di Tito,
it is impossible not to feel that its general conception
must have originated with a greater artist.

The Villa Bombicci has in fact the Michelangelesque
quality : the austerity, the breadth, the peculiar majesty
which he imparted to his slightest creations. The house
is built about three sides of a raised stone-flagged ter-
race, the enclosing elevation consisting of a two-storied
open arcade roofed by widely projecting eaves. The
wings are solid, with the exception of the sides toward
the arcade, and the windows, with their heavy pedi-
ments and consoles, are set far apart in true Tuscan
fashion. A majestic double flight of steps, flanked by
shield-bearing lions, leads up to the terrace about which
the house is built. Within is a high central saloon
opening at the back on a stone perron, with another
double flight of steps which descend in a curve to the
garden. On this side of the house there is, on the upper
floor, an open loggia of great beauty, consisting of three

53

ITALIAN VILLAS

arches divided by slender coupled shafts. Very fine,
also, is the arched and rusticated doorway surmounted
by a stone escutcheon.

The villa is approached by a cypress avenue which
leads straight to the open space before the house. The
ridge on which the latter is built is so narrow, and the
land falls away so rapidly, that there could never have
been much opportunity for the development of garden-
architecture ; but though all is now Anglicized, it is easy
to trace the original plan : in front, the open space sup-
ported by a high retaining-wall, on one side of the house
the grove of cypress and ilex, and at the back, where
there was complete privacy, the small giardino segreto,
or hedged garden, with its parterres, benches and
statues.

The purpose of this book is to describe the Italian
villa in relation to its grounds, and many villas which
have lost their old surroundings must therefore be
omitted ; but near Florence there is one old garden
which has always lacked its villa, yet which cannot be
overlooked in a study of Italian garden-craft. Even
those most familiar with the fascinations of Italian gar-
dens will associate a peculiar thrill with their first sight
of the Villa' Campi. Laid out by one of the Pucci
family, probably toward the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury, it lies beyond Lastra-Signa, above the Arno, about

'Villa, in Italian, signifies not the house alone, but the house and
pleasure-grounds.

54

FLORENTINE VILLAS

ten miles from F"lorence. It is not easy to reach, for
so long is it since any one has lived in the melancholy
villino of Villa Campi that even in the streets of Lastra,
the little walled town by the Arno, a guide is hard to
find. But at last one is told to follow a steep country
road among vines and olives, past two or three charm-
ing houses buried in ilex-groves, till the way ends in a
lane which leads up to a gateway surmounted by statues.
Ascending thence by a long avenue of cypresses, one
reaches the level hilltop on which the house should have
stood. Two pavilions connected by a high wall face
the broad open terrace, whence there is a far-spreading
view over the Arno valley: doubtless the main building
was to have been placed between them. But now the
place lies enveloped in a mysterious silence. The foot
falls noiselessly on the grass carpeting of the alleys, the
water is hushed in pools and fountains, and broken
statues peer out startlingly from their niches of undipped
foliage. From the open space in front of the pavilions,
long avenues radiate, descending and encircling the
hillside, walled with cypress and ilex, and leading to
rond-points set with groups of statuary, and to balus-
traded terraces overhanging the valley. The plan is
vast and complicated, and appears to have embraced the
whole hillside, which, contrary to the usual frugal Tuscan
plan, was to have been converted into a formal park with
vistas, quincunxes and fountains.

Entering a gate in the wall between the pavilions,

55

ITALIAN VILLAS

one comes on the terraced flower-gardens, and here the
same grandeur of conception is seen. The upper ter-
race preserves traces of its formal parterres and box-
hedges. Thence flights of steps lead down to a long
bowling-green between hedges, like that at the Gambe-
raia. A farther descent reveals another terrace-garden,
with clipped hedges, statues and fountains ; and thence
sloping alleys radiate down to stone-edged pools with
reclining river-gods in the mysterious shade of the ilex-
groves. Statues are everywhere: in the upper gardens,
nymphs, satyrs, shepherds, and the cheerful fauna of
the open pleasance ; at the end of the shadowy glades,
solemn figures of Titanic gods, couched above their pools
or reared aloft on mighty pedestals. Even the opposite
hillside must have been included in the original scheme
of this vast garden, for it still shows, on the central axis
between the pavilions, a tapis vevt between cypresses,
doubtless intended to lead up to some great stone Her-
cules under a crowning arch.

But it is not the size of the Campi gardens which
makes them so remarkable ; it is the subtle beauty of
their planning, to which time and neglect have added the
requisite touch of poetry. Never perhaps have natural
advantages been utilized with so little perceptible strain-
ing after effect, yet with so complete a sense of the
needful adjustment between landscape and architecture.
One feels that these long avenues and statued terraces
were meant to lead up to a "stately pleasure-house";

S6

FLORENTINE VILLAS

yet so little are they out of harmony with the surround-
ing scene that nature has gradually taken them back to
herself, has turned them into a haunted grove in which
the statues seem like sylvan gods fallen asleep in their
native shade.

There are other Florentine villas which preserve traces
of their old gardens. The beautiful Villa Palmieri has
kept its terrace-architecture, Lappeggi its fine double
stairway, the Villa Danti its grass-walk leading to a
giant on the hilltop, and Castel Pulci its stately facade
with a sky-line of statues and the long cypress avenue
shown in Zocchi's print; even Pratolino, so cruelly
devastated, still preserves Giovanni da Bologna s colossal
figure of the Apennines. But where so much of greater
value remains to be described, space fails to linger over
these fragments which, romantic and charming as they
are, can but faintly suggest, amid their altered surround-
ings, the vanished garden-plans of which they formed a
part.

57

SIENESE VILLAS

VICOBELLO

VICOBELLO, SIENA

I

II

SIENESE VILLAS

N the order of age, the first country-seat near Siena
which claims attention is the fortress-villa of Bel-

caro.

Frequent mention is made of the castle of Belcaro in
early chronicles and documents, and it seems to have
been a place of some importance as far back as the
eleventh century. It stands on a hilltop clothed with
oak and ilex in the beautiful wooded country to the
west of Siena, and from its ancient walls one looks forth
over the plain to the hill-set city and its distant circle of
mountains. It was perhaps for the sake of this enchant-
ing prospect that Baldassare Peruzzi, to whom the trans-
formation of Belcaro is ascribed, left these crenellated
walls untouched, and contented himself with adorning
the inner court of the castle with a delicate mask of
Renaissance architecture. A large bare villa of no
architectural pretensions was added to the mediaeval
buildings, and Peruzzi worked within the enclosed quad-
rangle thus formed.

A handsome architectural screen of brick and marble
with a central gateway leads from a stone-paved court

6

63

ITALIAN VILLAS

to a garden of about the same dimensions, at the back
of which is an arcaded loggia, also of brick and marble,
exquisitely light and graceful in proportion, and fres-
coed in the Raphaelesque manner with medallions and
arabesques, fruit-garlands and brightly plumed birds.
Adjoining this loggia is a small brick chapel, simple but
elegant in design, with a frescoed interior also ascribed
to Peruzzi, and still beautiful under its crude repainting.
The garden itself is the real hortus inclusiis of the
mediaeval chronicler : a small patch of ground enclosed
in the fortress walls, with box-edged plots, a central
well and clipped shrubs. It is interesting as a reminder
of what the mediaeval garden within the castle must have
been, and its setting of Renaissance architecture makes
it look like one of those little marble-walled pleasances,
full of fruit and flowers, in the backgrounds of Gozzoli
or Lorenzo di Credi.

Several miles beyond Belcaro, in a pleasant valley
among oak-wooded hills, lies the Marchese Chigi's
estate of Cetinale. A huge clipped ilex, one of the few
examples of Dutch topiary work in Italy, stands at the
angle of the road which leads to the gates. Across the
highway, facing the courtyard entrance, is another gate,
guarded by statues and leading to a long tapis vert
which ascends between double rows of square-topped
ilexes to a statue on the crest of the opposite slope.
The villa looks out on this perspective, facing it across
an oblong courtyard flanked by low outbuildings. The

64

SIENESE VILLAS

main house, said to have been built (or more probably
rebuilt) in 1680 by Carlo Fontana for Flavio Chigi,
nephew of Pope Alexander VII, is so small and modest
of aspect that one is surprised to learn that it was one
of the celebrated pleasure-houses of its day. It must
be remembered, however, that with the exception of the
great houses built near Rome by the Princes of the
Church, and the country-seats of such reigning families
as the Medici, the Italian villa was almost invariably a
small and simple building, the noble proprietor having
usually preferred to devote his wealth and time to the
embellishment of his gardens.

The house at Cetinale is so charming, with its stately
double flight of steps leading up to the first floor, and
its monumental doorway opening on a central salone,
that it may well be ascribed to the architect of San
Marcello in Rome, and of Prince Lichtenstein's "Garden
Palace" in Vienna. The plan of using the low-studded
ground floor for offices, wine-cellar and store-rooms,
while the living-rooms are all above-stairs, shows the
hand of an architect trained in the Roman school. All
the Tuscan and mid-Italian villas open on a level with
their gardens, while about Rome the country houses, at
least on one side, have beneath the living-rooms aground
floor generally used for the storage of wine and oil.

But the glory of Cetinale is its park. Behind the
villa a long grass-walk as wide as the house extends
between high walls to a fantastic gateway, with statues

65

ITALIAN VILLAS

in ivy-clad niches, and a curious crowning motive ter-
minating in obelisks and balls. Beyond this the turf-
walk continues again to a raised semicircular terrace,
surrounded by a wall adorned with busts and enclosed
in clipped ilexes. This terrace abuts on the ilex-clothed
hillside which bounds the valley. A gateway leads
directly into these wild romantic woods, and a steep
irregular flight of stone steps is seen ascending the
wooded slope to a tiny building on the crest of the hill.
This ascent is called the Scala Santa, and the building
to which it leads is a hermitage adorned with circular
niches set in the form of a cross, each niche containing
the bust of a saint. The hermitage being directly on
the axis of the villa, one looks out from the latter down
the admirable perspective of the tapis vert and up the
Scala Santa to the little house at its summit. It is inter-
esting to note that this effect of distance and grandeur
is produced at small cost and in the simplest manner ;
for the grass-walk with its semicircular end forms the
whole extent of the Cetinale garden. The olive-orchards
and corn-fields of the farm come up to the boundary
walls of the walk, and the wood is left as nature planted
it. Fontana, if it was indeed he who laid out this simple
but admirable plan, was wise enough to profit by the
natural advantage of the great forest of oak and ilex
which clothes this part of the country, and to realize
that only the broadest and simplest lines would be in
harmony with so noble a background.

66

LA PALAZXINA (VILLA GORl). 5it,NA

SIENESE VILLAS

As charming in its way, though less romantic and
original, is the Marchese Chigi's other seat of Vicobello,
a mile or two beyond the Porta Ovile, on the other side
of Siena. Vicobello lies in an open villa-studded
country in complete contrast to the wooded hills about
Cetinale. The villa is placed on a long narrow ridge
of land, falling away abruptly at the back and front. A
straight entrance avenue runs parallel to the outer walls
of the outbuildings, which form the boundary of the
court, the latter being entered through a vaulted porte-
cochere. Facing this entrance (as at Cetinale) is a
handsome gateway guarded by statues and set in a
semicircular wall. Passing through this gate, one de-
scends to a series of terraces planted with straight rows
of the square-topped ilexes so characteristic of the
Sienese gardens. These densely shaded terraces de-
scend to a level stretch of sward (perhaps an old bowl-
ing-green) bordered by a wall of clipped ilexes, at the
foot of the hill on which the villa stands.

On entering the forecourt, one faces the villa, a dig-
nified oblong building of simple Renaissance architec-
ture, ascribed in the local guide-book to Baldassare
Peruzzi, and certainly of earlier construction than the
house at Cetinale. On the left, a gate in a high wall
leads to a walled garden, bounded by a long lemon-
house which continues the line of the outbuildings on
the court. Opposite, a corresponding gateway opens
into the bosco which is the indispensable adjunct of the

69

ITALIAN VILLAS

Italian country house. On the other side of the villa
are two long terraces, one beneath the other, corre-
sponding in dimensions with the court, and flanked on
each hand by walled terrace-gardens, descending on
one side from the grove, on the other from the upper
garden adjoining the court. The plan, which is as
elaborate and minutely divided as that of Cetinale is
spacious and simple, shows an equally sure appreciation
of natural conditions, and of the distinction between a
villa siibnrbana and a country estate. The walls of the
upper garden are espaliered with fruit-trees, and the
box-edged flower-plots are probably laid out much as
they were in the eighteenth century. All the architec-
tural details are beautiful, especially a well in the court,
set in the wall between Ionic columns, and a charming
garden-house at the end of the upper garden, in the
form of an open archway faced with Doric pilasters,
before a semicircular recess with a marble seat. The
descending walled gardens, with their different levels,
give opportunity for many charming architectural effects
— busts in niches, curving steps, and well-placed vases
and statues ; and the whole treatment of Vicobello is
remarkable for the discretion and sureness of taste with
which these ornamental touches are added. There is
no excess of decoration, no crowding of effects, and the
garden-plan is in perfect keeping with the simple state-
liness of the house.

About a mile from Vicobello, on an olive-clad hillside

70

SIENESE VILLAS

near the famous monastery of the Osservanza, Hes an-
other villa of much more modest dimensions, with
grounds which, though in some respects typically
Sienese, are in one way unique in Italy. This is La
Palazzina, the estate of the De' Gori family. The small
seventeenth-century house, with its adjoining chapel
and outbuildings, lies directly on the public road, and
forms the boundary of its own grounds. The charm-
ing garden-facade, with its voluted sky-line, and the
two-storied open loggia forming the central motive
of the elevation, faces on a terrace-like open space,
bounded by a wall, and now irregularly planted d
V Auglaise, but doubtless once the site of the old
flower-garden. Before the house stands an old well
with a beautiful wrought-iron railing, and on the axis
of the central loggia a gate opens into one of the
pleached ilex-alleys which are the glory of the Palaz-
zina. This ancient tunnel of gnarled and interlocked
trees, where a green twilight reigns in the hottest sum-
mer noon, extends for several hundred feet along a
ridge of ground ending in a sort of circular knoll or
platform, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of square-
clipped ilexes. The platform has in its centre a round
clearing, from which four narrow paths radiate at right
angles, one abutting on the pleached walk, the others
on the outer ilex-wall. Between these paths are four
small circular spaces planted with stunted ilexes and
cypresses, which are cut down to the height of shrubs.

71

ITALIAN VILLAS

In these dwarf trees blinded thrushes are tied as decoys
to their wild kin, who are shot at from the circular
clearing or the side paths. This elaborate plantation is
a perfectly preserved specimen of a species of bird-trap
once, alas ! very common in this part of Italy, and in
which one may picture the young gallants of Folgore
da San Gimignano's Sienese sonnets " Of the Months"
taking their cruel pleasure on an autumn day.

Another antique alley of pleached ilexes, as densely
shaded but not quite as long, runs from the end of the
terrace to a small open-air theatre which is the greatest
curiosity of the Villa de' Gori. The pit of this theatre is
a semicircular opening, bounded by a low wall or seat,
which is backed by a high ilex-hedge. The parterre is
laid out in an elaborate broderie of turf and gravel, above
which the stage is raised about three feet. The pit and
the stage are enclosed in a double hedge of ilex, so that
the actors may reach the wings without being seen by
the audience ; but the stage-setting consists of rows of
clipped cypresses, each advancing a few feet beyond the
one before it, so that they form a perspective running
up to the back of the stage, and terminated by the tall
shaft of a single cypress which towers high into the
blue in the exact centre of the background. No mere
description of its plan can convey the charm of this ex-
quisite little theatre, approached through the mysterious
dusk of the long pleached alley, and lying in sunshine
and silence under its roof of blue sky, in its walls of

72

ink. i ritA IRE AT LA PALAZZINA. SIENA

SIENESE VILLAS

unchanging verdure. Imagination must people the
stage with the sylvan figures of the Aniinta or the
Pastor Fido, and must place on the encircling seats a
company of nobil donne in pearls and satin, with their
cavaliers in the black Spanish habit and falling lace
collar which Vandyke has immortalized in his Genoese
portraits ; and the remembrance of this leafy stage will
lend new life to the reading of the Italian pastorals, and
throw a brighter sunlight over the woodland comedies
of Shakspeare.

75

ROMAN VILLAS

r>si:

\

THE DOME OF ST. PETER'S. FROM THE VATICAN GARDENS

Ill

ROMAN VILLAS

IN studying the villas near the smaller Italian towns,
it is difficult to learn much of their history. Now
and then some information may be gleaned from
a local guide-book, but the facts are usually meagre or
inaccurate, and the name of the architect, the date of the
building, the original plan of the garden, have often alike
been forgotten.

With regard to the villas in and about Rome, the case
is different. Here the student is overwhelmed by a
profusion of documents. Illustrious architects dispute
the honour of having built the famous pleasure-houses
on the seven hills, and historians of art, from Vasari
downward, have recorded their annals. Falda engraved
them in the seventeenth century, and Percier and Fon-
taine at the beginning of the nineteenth ; and they have
been visited and described, at various periods, by count-
less travellers from different countries.

One of the earliest Roman gardens of which a descrip-
tion has been preserved is that which Bramante laid out
within the Vatican in the last years of the fifteenth
century. This terraced garden, with its monumental

8l

ITALIAN VILLAS

double flight of steps leading up by three levels to the
Giardino della Pigna, was described in 1523 by the
Venetian ambassador to Rome, who speaks of its grass
parterres and fountains, its hedges of laurel and cypress,
its plantations of mulberries and roses. One half of the
garden (the court of the Belvedere) had brick-paved
walks between rows of orange-trees ; in its centre were
statues of the Nile and the Tiber above a fountain ; while
the Apollo, the Laocoon and the Venus of the Vatican
were placed about it in niches. This garden was long
since sacrificed to the building of the Braccio Nuovo
and the Vatican Library; but it is worth mentioning
that Burckhardt, whose least word on Italian gardens is
more illuminating than the treatises of other writers,
thought that Bramante's terraced stairway first set the
example of that architectural magnificence which marks
the great Roman gardens of the Renaissance.

Next in date comes the Villa Madama, Raphael's un-
finished masterpiece on the slope of Monte Mario. This
splendid pleasure-house, which was begun in 15 16 for
Cardinal Giuliano de' Medici, afterward Pope Clement
VII, was intended to be the model of the great villa
subnybaiia, and no subsequent building of the sort is
comparable to what it would have been had the original
plans been carried out. But the villa was built under
an evil star. Raphael died before the work was finished,
and it was carried on with some alterations by Giulio
Romano and Antonio da Sangallo. In 1527 the troops

82

ROMAN VILLAS

of Cardinal Colonna nearly destroyed it by fire ; and,
without ever being completed, it passed successively into
the possession of the Chapter of St. Eustace, of the
Duchess of Parma (whence its name of Mac/a;>ia), and
of the King of Naples, who suffered it to fall into com-
plete neglect.

The unfinished building, with its mighty loggia stuc-
coed by Giovanni da Udine, and the semicircular arcade
at the back, is too familiar to need detailed description;
and the gardens are so dilapidated that they are of in-
terest only to an eye experienced enough to reconstruct
them from their skeleton. They consist of two long
terraces, one above the other, cut in the side of the
wooded slope overhanging the villa. The upper terrace
is on a level with Raphael's splendid loggia, and seems
but a roofless continuation of that airy hall. Against
the hillside and at the end it is bounded by a retaining-
wall once surmounted by a marble balustrade and set
with niches for statuary, while on the other side it looks
forth over the Tiber and the Campagna. Below this
terrace is another of the same proportions, its retaining-
wall broken at each end by a stairway descending from
the upper level, and the greater part of its surface taken
up by a large rectangular tank, into which water gushes
from the niches in the lateral wall. It is evident from
the breadth of treatment of these terraces that they are
but a fragment of the projected whole. Percier and
Fontaine, in their " Maisons de Plaisance de Rome"

83

ITALIAN VILLAS

(1809), published an interesting " reconstitution " of the
Villa Madama and its gardens, as they conceived it
might have been carried to completion ; but their plan is
merely the brilliant conjecture of two artists penetrated
with the spirit of the Renaissance, for they had no
documents to go by. The existing fragment is, how-
ever, well worthy of study, for the purity of its archi-
tecture and the broad simplicity of its plan are in marked
contrast to the complicated design and overcharged
details of some of the later Roman gardens.

Third in date among the early Renaissance gardens
comes another, of which few traces are left : that of the
Vigna del Papa, or Villa di Papa Giulio, just beyond the
Porta del Popolo. Here, however, the building itself,
and the architectural composition which once united the
house and grounds, are fortunately well preserved, and
so exceptionally interesting that they deserved a careful
description. The Villa di Papa Giulio was built by Pope
Julius III, whose pontificate extends from 1550 to 1555.
The villa therefore dates from the middle of the six-
teenth century ; but so many architects were associated
with it, and so much confusion exists as to their respec-
tive contributions, that it can only be said that the Pope
himself, Michelangelo, Vignola, Vasari and Amma-
nati appear all to have had a hand in the work. The
exterior elevation, though it has been criticized, is not
as inharmonious as might have been expected, and on
the garden side both plan and elevation have a charm

84

ROMAN VILLAS

and picturesqueness which disarm criticism. Above all,
it is felt at once that the arrangement is perfectly suited
to a warm climate. The villa forms a semicircle at the
back, enclosing a paved court. The ground floor is an
open vaulted arcade, adorned with Zucchero's celebrated
frescoes of putti peeping through vine-wreathed trel-
lises ; and the sides of the court, beyond this arcade, are
bounded by two-storied lateral wings, with blind arcades
and niches adorned with statues. Facing the villa, a
colonnaded loggia terminates the court ; and thence one
looks down into the beautiful lower court of the bath,
which appears to have been designed by Vasari. From
the loggia, steps descend to a semicircular court enclosed
in walls, with a balustraded opening in its centre ; and
this balustrade rests on a row of caryatids which encircle
the lowest court and form a screen before the grotto-like
bath under the arches of the upper terrace. The plan is
too complicated, and the architectural motives are too
varied, to admit of clear description : both must be seen
to give an idea of the full beauty of the composition.
Returning to the upper loggia above the bath, one looks
across the latter to a corresponding loggia of three arches
on the opposite side, on the axis of w'hich is a gateway
leading to the actual gardens — gardens which, alas ! no
longer exist. It will thus be seen that the flagged court,
the two open loggias, and the bath are so many skilfully
graduated steps in what Percier and Fontaine call the
" artistic progression " linking the gardens to the house,

85

ITALIAN VILLAS

while the whole is so planned that from the central hall
of the villa (and in fact from its entrance-door) one may-
look across the court and down the long vista of columns,
into what were once the shady depths of the garden.

In all Italian garden-architecture there is nothing
quite comparable for charm and delicately reminiscent
classicalism with this grotto-bath of Pope Julius's villa.
Here we find the tradition of the old Roman villa-archi-
tecture, as it had been lovingly studied in the letters
of Pliny, transposed into Renaissance forms, with the
sense of its continued fitness to unchanged conditions
of climate and a conscious return to the splendour of
the old patrician life. It is instructive to compare this
natural reflowering of a national art with the frigid
archaeological classicalism of Winckelmann and Canova.
Here there is no literal transcription of uncompre-
hended detail: the spirit is preserved, because it is still
living, but it finds expression in subtly altered forms.
Above all, the artist has drawn his inspiration from
Roman art, the true source of modern architecture, and
not from that of Greece, which, for all its beauty and far-
reaching aesthetic influences, was not the starting-point
of modern artistic conceptions, for the plain historical
reason that it was utterly forgotten and unknown when
the mediaeval world began to wake from its lethargy
and gather up its scattered heritage of artistic tradi-
tions.

When John Evelyn came to Rome in 1644 and

86

ENTRANCE TO FORECOURT, VILLA BORGHESE, ROME

ROMAN VILLAS

alighted "at Monsieur Petit's in the Piazza Spagnola,"
many of the great Roman villas were still in the first
freshness of their splendour, and the taste which called
them forth had not yet wearied of them. Later trav-
ellers, with altered ideas, were not sufficiently interested
to examine in detail what already seemed antiquated
and out of fashion; but to Evelyn, a passionate lover
of architecture and garden-craft, the Italian villas were
patterns of excellence, to be carefully studied and mi-
nutely described for the benefit of those who sought
to imitate them in England. It is doubtful if later
generations will ever be diverted by the aquatic "sur-
prises " and mechanical toys in which Evelyn took such
simple pleasure; but the real beauties he discerned are
once more receiving intelligent recognition after two
centuries of contempt and indifference. It is worth
noting in this connection that, at the very height of the
reaction against Italian gardens, they were lovingly
studied and truly understood by two men great enough
to rise above the prejudices of their age: the French
architects Percier and Fontaine, whose volume con-
tains some of the most suggestive analyses ever written
of the purpose and meaning of Renaissance garden-
architecture.

Probably one of the least changed among the villas
visited by Evelyn is "the house of the Duke of Flor-
ence upon the brow of Mons Pincius." The Villa
Medici, on being sold by that family in 1801, had the

89

ITALIAN VILLAS

good fortune to pass into the hands of the French gov-
ernment, and its "facciata incrusted with antique and
rare basso-rehevos and statues " still looks out over the
statued arcade, the terrace " balustraded with white
marble" and planted with "perennial greens," and the
"mount planted with cypresses," which Evelyn so justly
admired.

The villa, built in the middle of the sixteenth century
by Annibale Lippi, was begun for one cardinal and
completed for another. It stands in true Italian fashion
against the hillside above the Spanish Steps, its airy
upper stories planted on one of the mighty bastion-like
basements so characteristic of the Roman villa. A
villa above, a fortress below, it shows that, even in the
polished cinque-cento, life in the Papal States needed
the protection of stout walls and heavily barred win-
dows. The garden-fa9ade, raised a story above the
entrance, has all the smiling openness of the Renaissance
pleasure-house, and is interesting as being probably the
earliest example of the systematic use of fragments of
antique sculpture in an architectural elevation. But this
facade, with its charming central loggia, is sufficiently
well known to make a detailed description superfluous,
and it need be studied here only in relation to its sur-
roundings.

Falda's plan of the grounds, and that of Percier and
Fontaine, made over a hundred and fifty years later,
show how little succeeding fashions have been allowed

90

GROTTO, VILLA Dl PAPA GIULIO, ROME

ROMAN VILLAS

to disturb the original design. The gardens are still
approached by a long shady alley which ascends from
the piazza before the entrance ; and they are still di-
vided into a symmetrically planted grove, a flower-gar-
den before the house, and an upper wild-wood with
a straight path leading to the " mount planted with
cypresses."

It is safe to say that no one enters the grounds of the
Villa Medici without being soothed and charmed by that
garden-magic which is the peculiar quality of some of
the old Italian pleasances. It is not necessary to be a
student of garden-architecture to feel the spell of quiet
and serenity which falls on one at the very gateway ;
but it is worth the student's while to try to analyze the
elements of which the sensation is composed. Perhaps
they will be found to resolve themselves into diversity,
simplicity and fitness. The plan of the garden is simple,
but its different parts are so contrasted as to produce, by
the fewest means, a pleasant sense of variety without
sacrifice of repose. The ilex-grove into which one first
enters is traversed by hedged alleys which lead to rond-
pomts with stone seats and marble Terms. At one point
the enclosing wall of ilex is broken to admit a charming
open loggia, whence one looks into the depths of green
below. Emerging from the straight shady walks, with
their effect of uniformity and repose, one comes on the
flower-garden before the house, spreading to the sun-
shine its box-edged parterres adorned with fountains

93

ITALIAN VILLAS

and statues. Here garden and house-front are har-
monized by a strong predominance of architectural Hues,
and by the beautiful lateral loggia, with niches for
statues, above which the upper ilex-wood rises. Tall
hedges and trees there are none ; for from the villa one
looks across the garden at the wide sweep of the Cam-
pagna and the mountains ; indeed, this is probably one
of the first of the gardens which Gurlitt defines as " gar-
dens to look out from," in contradistinction to the earlier
sort, the "gardens to look into." Mounting to the ter-
race, one comes to the third division of the garden, the
wild-wood with its irregular levels, through which a
path leads to the mount, with a little temple on its sum-
mit. This is a rare feature in Italian grounds: in hilly
Italy there was small need of creating the artificial hill-
ocks so much esteemed in the old English gardens. In
this case, however, the mount justifies its existence, for
it affords a wonderful view over the other side of Rome
and the Campagna.

Finally, the general impression of the Medici garden
resolves itself into a sense of fitness, of perfect harmony
between the material at hand and the use made of it.
The architect has used his opportunities to the utmost ;
but he has adapted nature without distorting it. In
some of the great French gardens, at Vaux and Ver-
sailles for example, one is conscious, under all the
beauty, of the immense effort expended, of the vast up-
heavals of earth, the forced creating of effects ; but it

94

TEMPLE OF jESCULAPIUS, VILLA BORGHESE, ROME

ROMAN VILLAS

was the great gift of the ItaHan gardener to see the nat-
ural advantages of his incomparable landscape, and to
fit them into his scheme with an art which concealed
itself.

While Annibale Lippi, an architect known by only-
two buildings, was laying out the Medici garden, the
Palatine Hill was being clothed with monumental ter-
races by a master to whom the Italian Renaissance
owed much of its stateliest architecture. Vignola, who
transformed the slopes of the Palatine into the sumptu-
ous Farnese gardens, was the architect of the mighty
fortress-villa of Caprarola, and of the garden-portico of
Mondragone ; and tradition ascribes to him also the in-
comparable Lante gardens at Bagnaia.

In the Farnese gardens he found full play for his gift
of grouping masses and for the scenic sense which en-
abled him to create such grandiose backgrounds for the
magnificence of the great Roman prelates. The Pala-
tine gardens have been gradually sacrificed to the exca-
vations of the Palace of the Caesars, but their almost
theatrical magnificence is shown in the prints of Falda
and of Percier and Fontaine. In this prodigal develop-
ment of terraces, niches, porticoes and ramps, one per-
ceives the outcome of Bramante's double staircase in
the inner gardens of the Vatican, and Burckhardt justly
remarks that in the Farnese gardens "the period of
unity of composition and effective grouping of masses "
finally triumphs over the earlier style.

97

ITALIAN VILLAS

No villa was ever built on this site, and there is
consequently an air of heaviness and over-importance
about the stately ascent which leads merely to two
domed pavilions ; but the composition would have
regained its true value had it been crowned by such a
palace as the Roman cardinals were beginning to erect
for themselves. It is especially interesting to note the
contrast in style and plan between this garden and that
of the contemporaneous Villa Medici. One was designed
for display, the other for privacy, and the success with
which the purpose of each is fulfilled shoAvs the origi-
nality and independence of their creators. It is a com-
mon error to think of the Italian gardens of the Renais-
sance as repeating endlessly the same architectural
effects : their peculiar charm lies chiefly in the versatility
with which their designers adapted them to different
sites and different requirements.

As an example of this independence of meaningless
conventions, let the student turn from the Villa Medici
and the Orti Farnesiani to a third type of villa created
at the same time — the Casino of Pope Pius IV in the
Vatican gardens, built in 1560 by the Neapolitan archi-
tect Pirro Ligorio.

This exquisite little garden-house lies in a hollow of
the outer Vatican gardens near the Via de' Fondamenti.
A hillside once clothed with a grove rises abruptly
behind it, and in this hillside a deep oblong cut has
been made and faced with a retaining- wall. In the

98

VILLA MEDICI, ROME

ROMAN VILLAS

space thus cleared the villa is built, some ten or fifteen
feet away from the wall, so that its ground floor is cool
and shaded without bemg damp. The building, which
is long and narrow, runs lengthwise into the cut, its
long facades being treated as sides, while it presents
a narrow end as its front elevation. The propriety of
this plan will be seen when the restricted surroundings
are noted. In such a small space a larger structure
would have been disproportionate ; and Ligorio hit on
the only means of giving to a house of considerable size
the appearance of a mere garden-pavilion.

Percier and Fontaine say that Ligorio built the Villa
Pia "after the manner of the ancient houses, of which
he had made a special study." The influence of the
Roman fresco-architecture is in fact visible in this deli-
cious little building, but so freely modified by the per-
sonal taste of the architect that it has none of the rigidity
of the "reconstitution," but seems rather the day-dream
of an artist who has saturated his mind with the past.

The fagade is a mere pretext for the display of the
most exquisite and varied stucco ornamentation, in
which motives borrowed from the Roman stucchi are
harmonized with endless versatility. In spite of the
wealth of detail, it is saved from heaviness and confu-
sion by its delicacy of treatment and by a certain naivety
which makes it more akin (fantastic as the comparison
may seem) with the stuccoed facade of San Bernardino
at Perugia than with similar compositions of its own

lOI

ITALIAN VILLAS

period. The angels or genii in the oblong panels are
curiously suggestive of Agostino da Duccio, and the
pale-yellow tarnished surface of the stucco recalls the
delicate hues of the Perugian chapel.

The ground floor consists of an open loggia of three
arches on columns, forming a kind of atrium curiously

faced with an elaborate
mosaic-work of tiny
round pebbles, stained
in various colours and
set in arabesques and
other antique patterns.
The coigns of the fagade
are formed of this same
mosaic — a last touch of
fancifulness where all is
fantastic. The barrel-
vault of the atrium is a
marvel of delicate stiic-
catitre, evidently inspired by the work of Giovanni da
Udine at the Villa Madama ; and at each end stands a
splendid marble basin resting on winged griffins. The
fragile decorations of this exquisite loggia are open on
three sides to the weather, and many windows of the
upper rooms (which are decorated in the same style) are
unshuttered and have broken panes, so that this unique
example of cinque-cento decoration is gradually falling
into ruin from mere exposure. The steps of the atrium,

I02

COURTYARD GATE OF THE VILLA PIA

ROMAN VILLAS

flanked by marble Cupids on dolphins, lead to an oval
paved court with a central fountain in which the Cupid-
motive is repeated. This court is enclosed by a low wall
with a seat running around it and surmounted by marble
vases of a beautiful tazza-like shape. Facing the loggia,
the wall is broken (as at the Villa di Papa Giulio) by a
small pavilion resting on an open arcade, with an attic
adorned with stucco panels ; while at the sides, equidis-
tant between the villa and the pavilion, are two vaulted
porticoes, with facades like arches of triumph, by means
of which access is obtained to curving ramps that lead
to the lower level of the gardens. These porticoes are
also richly adorned with stucco panels, and lined within
with a mosaic-work of pebbles, forming niches for a row
of busts.

From the central pavilion one looks down on a tank
at its base (the pavilion being a story lower on its outer
or garden side). This tank is surmounted by a statue
of Thetis on a rock-work throne, in a niche formed in
the basement of the pavilion. The tank encloses the
pavilion on three sides, like a moat, and the water,
gushing from three niches, overflows the low stone curb
and drips on a paved walk slightly hollowed to receive
it — a device producing a wonderful effect of coolness
and superabundance of water.

The old gardens of the villa were on a level with the
tank, and Falda's print shows the ingenuity of their
planning. These gardens have now been almost entirely

103

ITALIAN VILLAS

destroyed, and the bosco above the villa has been cut
down and replaced by bare grass-banks dotted with
shrubs.

The Villa Pia has been thus minutely described, first,
because it is seldom accessible, and consequently little
known; but chiefly because it is virtually not a dwelling-
house, but a garden-house, and thus forms a part of the
actual composition of the garden. As such it stands
alone in Italian architecture, and Burckhardt, who notes
how well its lavish ornament is suited to a little pleasure-
pavilion in a garden, is right in describing it as the
" most perfect retreat imaginable for a midsummer after-
noon."

The outer gardens of the Vatican, in a corner of which
the Villa Pia lies, were probably laid out by Antonio da
Sangallo the Younger, who died in 1546; and though
much disfigured, they still show traces of their original
plan. The sunny sheltered terrace, espaliered with
lemons, is a good example of the "walk for the cold
season " for which Italian garden-architects always pro-
vided ; and the large sunken flower-garden surrounded
by hanging woods is one of the earliest instances of this
effective treatment of the giardino segreto. In fact, the
Vatican may have suggested many features of the later
Renaissance garden, with its wide-spread plan which
gradually came to include the park.

The seventeenth century saw the development of this
extended plan, but saw also the decline of the architec-

104

VILLA PIA— IN THE GARDENS OF THE VATICAN

■..W

VILLA

ROMAN VILLAS

tural restraint and purity of detail which mark the
generation of Vignola and Sangallo. The Villa Bor-
ghese, built in 1618 by the Flemish architect Giovanni
Vasanzia (John of Xanten), shows a complete departure
from the old tradition. Its elevation may indeed be
traced to the influence of the garden-front of the Villa
Medici, which was probably the prototype of the gay
pleasure-house in which ornamental detail superseded
architectural composition ; but the garden-architecture
of the Villa Borghese, and the treatment of its extensive
grounds, show the complete triumph of the baroque.

The grounds of the Villa Borghese, which include a
park of several hundred acres, were laid out by Dome-
nico Savino and Girolamo Rainaldi, while its water-
works are due to Giovanni Fontana, whose name is
associated with the great jeux d'eatix of the villas at
Frascati. Falda's plan shows that the grounds about
the house have been little changed. At each end of the
villa is the oblong secret garden, not sunken but walled ;
in front an entrance-court, at the back an open space
enclosed in a wall of clipped ilexes against which statues
were set, and containing a central fountain. Beyond the
left-hand walled garden are various dependencies, in-
cluding an aviary. These little buildings, boldly baroque
in style, surcharged with stucco ornament, and not with-
out a certain Flemish heaviness of touch, have yet that
gaiety, that impre'vii, which was becoming the distin-
guishing note of Roman garden-architecture. On a

107

ITALIAN VILLAS

larger scale they would be oppressive ; but as mere
garden-houses, with their leafy background, and the
picturesque adjuncts of high walls, wrought-iron gates,
vases and statues, they have an undeniable charm.

The plan of the Borghese park has been the subject
of much discussion. Falda's print shows only the

vicinity of the villa, and
it has never been decid-
ed when the outlying
grounds were laid out
and how much they have
been modified. At pres-
ent the park, with its
romantic groves of um-
brella-pine, its ilex ave-
nues, lake and amphitheatre, its sham ruins and little
buildings scattered on irregular grassy knolls, has the
appearance of 2,jardin anglais\2\d out at the end of the
eighteenth century. Herr Tuckermann, persuaded that
this park is the work of Giovanni Fontana, sees in him
the originator of the "sentimental" English and Ger-
man landscape-gardens, with their hermitages, mauso-
leums and temples of Friendship ; but Percier and Fon-
taine, from whose plan of the park his inference is
avowedly drawn, state that the grounds were much
modified in 1789 by Jacob Moore, an English landscape-
gardener, and by Pietro Camporesi of Rome. Herr
Gurlitt, who seems to ha\x overlooked this statement,

108

GATEWAY OF THE VILLA BORGHESE

ROMAN VILLAS

declares himself unable to pronounce on the date of this
"creation already touched with the feeling of sentimen-
tality"; but Burckhardt, who is always accurate, says
that the hippodrome and the temple of .^sculapius are
of late date, and that the park was remodelled in the
style of Poussin's landscapes in 1849.

About thirty years later than the Villa Borghese there
arose its rival among the great Roman country-seats, the
Villa Belrespiro or Pamphily, on the Janiculan. The
Villa Pamphily, designed by Alessandro Algardi of
Bologna, is probably the best known and most admired
of Roman niaisons de plaisaiice, and its incomparable
ilex avenues and pine-woods, its rolling meadows and
wide views over the Campagna, have enchanted many
to whom its architectural beauties would not appeal.

The house, with its incrustations of antique bas-reliefs,
cleverly adapted in the style of the Villa Medici, but
with far greater richness and license of ornament, is a
perfect example of the seventeenth-century villa, or
rather casino ; for it was really intended, not for a resi-
dence, but for a suburban lodge. It is flanked by lateral
terraces, and the garden-front is a story lower than the
other, so that the balcony of the first floor looks down
on a great sunken garden, enclosed in the retaining-w^alls
of the terraces, and richly adorned with statues in niches,
fountains and parterres de broderie. Thence a double
stairway descends to what was once the central portion
of the gardens, a great amphitheatre bounded by ilex-

109

ITALIAN VILLAS

woods, with a theatre d'eanx and stately flights of
steps leading up to terraced ilex-groves ; but all this
lower garden was turned into an English park in the
first half of the nineteenth century. One of the finest
of Roman gardens fell a sacrifice to this senseless change;
for in beauty of site, in grandeur of scale, and in the
wealth of its Roman sculpture, the Villa Pamphily was
unmatched. Even now it is full of interesting fragments ;
but the juxtaposition of an undulating lawn and dotty
shrubberies to the stately garden-architecture about the
villa has utterly destroyed the unity of the composition.
There is a legend to the effect that Le Notre laid out
the park of the Villa Pamphily when he came to Rome
in 1678; but Percier and Fontaine, who declare that
there is nothing to corroborate the story, point out that
the Villa Pamphily was begun over thirty years before
Le Notre's visit. Absence of proof, however, means
little to the average French author, eager to vindicate
Le Notre's claim to being the father not only of French,
but of Italian landscape-architecture ; and AI. Riat, in
" L'Art des Jardins," repeats the legend of the Villa
Pamphily, while Dussieux, in his "Artists Fran^ais a
TEtranger," anxious to heap further honours on his com-
patriot, actually ascribes to him the plan of the Villa
Albani, which was laid out by Pietro Nolli nearly two
hundred years after Le Notre's visit to Rome I Appa-
rently the whole story of Le Notre's laying out of Italian
gardens is based on the fact that he remodelled some

I 10

VILLA CHIGI, ROME

v' I L L A C H 1 c>

_i~

^TH

ROMAN VILLAS

details of the Villa Ludovisi ; but one need only compare
the dates of his gardens with those of the principal
Roman villas to see that he was the pupil and not the
master of the great Italian garden-architects.

The last great country house built for a Roman cardi-
nal is the villa outside the Porta Salaria which Carlo
Marchionne built in 1746 for Cardinal Albani. In spite
of its late date, the house still conforms to the type of
Roman villa snbiirbaiia which originated with the Villa
Medici ; and it is interesting to observe that the Roman
architects, having hit on so appropriate and original a
style, did not fear to continue it in spite of the growing
tendency toward a lifeless classicalism.

Cardinal Albani was a passionate collector of antique
sculpture, and the villa, having been built to display his
treasures, is appropriately planned with an open arcade
between rusticated pilasters, which runs the whole length
of the facade on the ground floor, and is continued by a
long portico at each end. The grounds, laid out by
Antonio Nolli, have been much extolled. Burckhardt
sees in them traces of the reaction of French eighteenth-
century gardening on the Italian school ; but may it not
rather be that, the Villa Albani being, by a rare excep-
tion, built on level ground, the site inevitably suggested
a treatment similar to the French ? It is hard to find
anything specifically French, any motive which has not
been seen again and again in Italy, in the plan of the
Albani gardens ; and their most charming feature, the

10

113

ITALIAN VILLAS

long ilex-walk connecting the villa with the bosco,
exemplifies the Italian habit of providing shady access
from the house to the wood. Dussieux, at any rate,
paid Le Notre no compliment in attributing to him the
plan of the Villa Albani ; for the great French artist
contrived to put more poetry into the flat horizons of
Vaux and Versailles than Nolli has won from the famous
view of the Campagna which is said to have governed
the planning of the Villa Albani.

The grounds are laid out in formal quincunxes of
clipped ilex, but before the house lies a vast' sunken
garden enclosed in terraces. The farther end of the
garden is terminated by a semicircular portico called the
Caffe, built later than the house, under the direction of
Winckelmann ; and in this structure, and in the archi-
tecture of the terraces, one sees the heavy touch of that
neo-Grecianism which was to crush the life out of
eighteenth-century art. The gardens of the Villa Albani
seem to have been decorated by an archaeologist rather
than an artist. It is interesting to note that antique
sculpture, when boldly combined with a living art, is
one of the most valuable adjuncts of the Italian garden ;
whereas, set in an artificial evocation of its own past, it
loses all its vitality and becomes as lifeless as its back-
ground.

One of the most charming of the smaller Roman villas
lies outside the Porta Salaria, a mile or two beyond the
Villa Albani. This is the country-seat of Prince Don

114

/

PARTERRES ON TERRACE, VILLA BELRESPIRO
(PAMPHILY-DORIA), ROME

ROMAN VILLAS

Lodovico Chigi. In many respects it recalls the Sienese
type of villa. At the entrance, the highroad is enlarged
into a semicircle, backed by a wall with busts ; and on
the axis of the iron gates one sees first a court flanked
by box-gardens, then an open archway running through
the centre of the house, and beyond that, the vista of a
long walk enclosed in high box-hedges and terminating
in another semicircle with statues, backed by an ilex-
planted mount. The plan has all the compactness and
charm of the Tuscan and Umbrian villas. The level
ground about the house is subdivided into eight square
box-hedged gardens, four on a side, enclosing symmet-
rical box-bordered plots. Beyond these are two little
groves with statues and benches. The ground falls away
in farm-land below this level, leaving only the long cen-
tral alley which appears to lead to other gardens, but
which really ends in the afore-mentioned semicircle,
behind which is a similar alley, running at right angles,
and leading directly to the fields.

At the other end of Rome lies the only small Roman
garden comparable in charm with Prince Chigi's. This
is the Priorato, or Villa of the Knights of Malta, near
Santa Sabina, on the Aventine. Piranesi, in 1765,
remodelled and decorated the old chapel adjoining the
house ; and it is said that he also laid out the garden.
If he did so, it shows how late the tradition of the
Renaissance garden lingered in Italy ; for there is no
trace of romantic influences in the Priorato. The grounds

ITALIAN VILLAS

are small, for the house stands on a steep ledge over-
looking the Tiber, whence there is a glorious view of
St. Peter's and the Janiclilan. The designer of the
garden evidently felt that it must be a mere setting to
this view ; and accordingly he laid out a straight walk,
walled with box and laurel and running from the gate
to the terrace above the river. The prospect framed in
this green tunnel is one of the sights of Rome ; and, by
a touch peculiarly Italian, the keyhole of the gate has
been so placed as to take it in. To the left of the
pleached walk lies a small flower-garden, planted with
square-cut box-trees, and enclosed in a high wall with
niches containing statues: a real "secret garden," full
of sunny cloistered stillness, in restful contrast to the
wide prospect below the terrace.

The grounds behind the Palazzo Colonna belong to
another type, and are an interesting example of the
treatment of a city garden, especially valuable now that
so many of the great gardens within the walls of Rome
have been destroyed.

The Colonna palace stands at the foot of the Ouirinal
Hill, and the gardens are built on the steep slope behind
it, being entered by a stately gateway from the Via
Quirinale. On this upper level there is a charming
rectangular box-garden, with flower-plots about a central
basin. Thence one descends to two narrow terraces,
one beneath the other, planted with box and ilex, and
adorned with ancient marbles. Down the centre, start-

Ii8

ROMAN VILLAS

ing from the upper garden, there is an elaborate chateau
d'eaii of baroque design, with mossy urns and sea-gods,
terminating in a basin fringed with ferns ; and beneath
this central composition the garden ends in a third wide
terrace, planted with square-clipped ilexes, which look
from above like a level floor of verdure. Graceful stone
bridges connect this lowest terrace with the first-floor
windows of the palace, which is divided from its garden
by a narrow street ; and the whole plan is an interesting
example of the beauty and variety of effect which may
be produced on a small steep piece of ground.

Of the other numerous gardens which once crowned
the hills of Rome, but few fragments remain. The Villa
Celimontana, or Mattel, on the Caslian, still exists, but
its grounds have been so Anglicized that it is interesting
chiefly from its site and from its associations with
St. Philip Neri, whose seat beneath the giant ilexes is
still preserved. The magnificent Villa Ludovisi has
vanished, leaving only, amid a network of new streets,
the Casino of the Aurora and a few beautiful fragments
of architecture incorporated in the courtyard of the ugly
Palazzo Margherita ; and the equally famous Villa
Negroni was swept away to make room for the Piazza
delle Terme and the Grand Hotel. The Villa Sacchetti,
on the slope of Monte Mario, is in ruins ; in ruins the
old hunting-lodge of Cecchignola, in the Campagna, on
the way to the Divino Amore. These and many others
are gone or going ; but at every turn the watchful eye

119

ITALIAN VILLAS

still lights on some lingering fragment of old garden-art
— some pillared gateway or fluted vasca or broken
statue cowering in its niche — all testifying to what
Rome's crown of gardens must have been, and still full
of suggestion to the student of her past.

I 20

VIEW FROM LOWER GARDEN, VILLA BELRESPIRU
(PAMPHILY-DORLA), ROME

VILLAS NEAR ROME

VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI

IV

VILLAS NEAR ROME

CAPRAROLA AND LANTE

THE great cardinals did not all build their villas
within sight of St. Peter's. One of them,
Alexander Farnese, chose a site above the
mountain village of Caprarola, which looks forth over
the Etrurian plain strewn with its ancient cities — Nepi,
Orte and Civita Castellana — to Soracte, rising solitary
in the middle distance, and the encircling line of snow-
touched Apennines.

There is nothing in all Italy like Caprarola. Burck-
hardt calls it "perhaps the highest example of restrained
majesty which secular architecture has achieved"; and
Herr Gurlitt makes the interesting suggestion that
Vignola, in building it, broke away from the traditional
palace-architecture of Italy and sought his inspiration in
France. "Caprarola," he says, "shows the northern
castle in the most modern form it had then attained. . . .

IX

127

ITALIAN VILLAS

We have to do here with one of the fortified residences
rarely seen save in the north, but doubtless necessary
in a neighbourhood exposed to the ever-increasing
dangers of brigandage. Italy, indeed, built castles and
fortified works, but the fortress-palace, equally adapted
to peace and war, was almost unknown."

The numerous illustrated publications on Caprarola
make it unnecessary to describe its complex architecture
in detail. It is sufficient to say that its five bastions are
surrounded by a deep moat, across which a light bridge
at the back of the palace leads to the lower garden. To
pass from the threatening fagade to the wide-spread
beauty of pleached walks, fountains and grottoes, brings
vividly before one the curious contrasts of Italian coun-
try life in the transition period of the sixteenth century.
Outside, one pictures the cardinal's soldiers and byavi
lounging on the great platform above the village ; while
within, one has a vision of noble ladies and their cava-
liers sitting under rose-arbours or strolling between
espaliered lemon-trees, discussing a Greek manuscript
or a Roman bronze, or listening to the last sonnet of the
cardinal's court poet.

The lower garden of Caprarola is a mere wreck of
overgrown box-parterres and crumbling wall and balus-
trade. Plaster statues in all stages of decay stand in
the niches or cumber the paths ; fruit-trees have been
planted in the flower-beds, and the maidenhair withers
in grottoes where the water no longer flows. The archi-

128

VILLA CAPRAROLA

VILLAS NEAR ROME

tectural detail of the fountains and arches is sumptuous
and beautiful, but the outline of the general plan is not
easy to trace ; and one must pass out of this enclosure
and climb through hanging oak-woods to a higher level
to gain an idea of what the gardens once were.

Beyond the woods a broad tapis vert leads to a level
space with a circular fountain sunk in turf Partly sur-
rounding this is an architectural composition of rusti-
cated arcades, between which a chdteau d'eau descends
the hillside from a grotto surmounted by two mighty
river-gods, and forming the central motive of a majestic
double stairway of rusticated stonework. This leads up
to the highest terrace, which is crowned by Vignola's
exquisite casino, surely the most beautiful garden-house
in Italy. The motive of the arcades and stairway,
though fine in itself, may be criticized as too massive
and important to be in keeping with the delicate little
building above ; but once on the upper terrace, the lack
of proportion is no longer seen and all the surroundings
are harmonious. The composition is simple : around
the casino, with its light arcades raised on a broad flight
of steps, stretches a level box-garden with fountains,
enclosed in a low wall surmounted by the famous Cane-
phorae seen in every picture of Caprarola — huge sylvan
'figures half emerging from their stone sheaths, some
fierce or solemn, some full of rustic laughter. The
audacity of placing that row of fantastic terminal divini-
ties against reaches of illimitable air girdled in mountains

ITALIAN VILLAS

gives an indescribable touch of poetry to the upper gar-
den of Caprarola. There is a quahty of inevitableness
about it — one feels of it, as of certain great verse, that
it could not have been otherwise, that, in Vasari's happy
phrase, it was bom, not built.

Not more than twelve miles from Caprarola lies the
other famous villa attributed to Vignola, and which one
wishes he may indeed have built, if only to show how a
great artist can vary his resources in adapting himself
to a new theme. The Villa Lante, at Bagnaia, near
Viterbo, appears to have been the work not of one car-
dinal, but of four. Raphael Riario, Cardinal Bishop of
Viterbo, began it toward the end of the fifteenth century,
and the work, carried on by his successors in the see,
Cardinals Ridolfi and Gambara, was finally completed
in 1588 by Cardinal Montalto, nephew of Sixtus V,
who bought the estate from the bishops of Viterbo and
bequeathed it to the Holy See. Percier and Fontaine
believe that several architects collaborated in the work,
but its unity of composition shows that the general
scheme must have originated in one mind, and Herr
Gurlitt thinks there is nothing to disprove that Vignola
was its author.

Lante, like Caprarola, has been exhaustively sketched
and photographed, but so perfect is it, so far does it
surpass, in beauty, in preservation, and in the quality
of garden-magic, all the other great pleasure-houses of
Italy, that the student of garden-craft may always find

132

THE CASINO, VILLA FARNESE, CAPRAROLA

kO aHT

VILLAS NEAR ROME

fresh inspiration in its study. If Caprarola is "a garden
to look out from," Lante is one "to look into," not in
the sense that it is enclosed, for its terraces command a
wide horizon ; but the pleasant landscape surrounding
it is merely accessory to the gardens, a last touch of
loveliness where all is lovely.

The designer of Lante understood this, and perceived
that, the surroundings being unobtrusive, he might
elaborate the foreground. The flower-garden occupies
a level space in front of the twin pavilions ; for instead
of one villa there are two at Lante, absolutely identical,
and connected by a ranipe dottce which ascends between
them to an upper terrace. This peculiar arrangement
is probably due to the fact that Cardinal Montalto, who
built the second pavilion, found there was no other way
of providing more house-room without disturbing the
plan of the grounds. The design of the flower-garden
is intricate and beautiful, and its box-bordered parterres
surround one of the most famous and beautiful fountains
in Italy. The abundance of water at Lante enabled the
designer to produce a great variety of effects in what
Germans call the "water-art," and nowhere was his
invention happier than in planning this central fountain.
It stands in a square tank or basin, surrounded by a
balustrade, and crossed by four little bridges which lead
to a circular balustraded walk, enclosing an inner basin
from the centre of which rises the fountain. Bridges
also cross from the circular walk to the platform on

ITALIAN VILLAS

which the fountain is built, so that one may stand under
the arch of the water-jets, and look across the garden
through a mist of spray.

Lante, doubly happy in its site, is as rich in shade as
in water, and the second terrace, behind the pavilions,
is planted with ancient plane-trees. Above this terrace
rise three others, all wooded with plane and ilex, and
down the centre, from the woods above, rushes the cas-
cade which feeds the basin in the flower-garden. The
terraces, with their balustrades and obelisks and double
flights of steps, form a stately setting to this central
chateau d'eaii, through which the water gushes by
mossy steps and channels to a splendid central compo-
sition of superimposed basins flanked by recumbent
river-gods.

All the garden-architecture at Lante merits special
study. The twin pavilions seem plain and insignificant
after the brilliant elevations of the great Roman villas,
but regarded as part of the garden-scheme, and not as
dominating it, they fall into their proper place, and are
seen to be good examples of the severe but pure style
of the early cinque-cento. Specially interesting also is
the treatment of the retaining-wall which faces the en-
trance to the grounds; and the great gates of the flower-
gardens, and the fountains and garden-houses on the
upper terraces, are all happy instances of Renaissance
garden-art untouched by barocchismo.

At Lante, also, one sees one of the earliest examples

136

VILLA LANTE, BAGNALA

VILLAS NKAR ROME

of the inclusion of the woodland in the garden-scheme.
All the sixteenth-century villas had small groves ad-
jacent to the house, and the shade of the natural wood-
land was used, if possible, as a backing to the gardens;
but at the Villa Lante it is boldly worked into the gen-
eral scheme, the terraces and garden-architecture are
skilfully blent with it, and its recesses are pierced by
grass alleys leading to clearings where pools surrounded
by stone seats slumber under the spreading branches.

The harmonizing of wood and garden is one of the
characteristic features of the villas at Frascati ; but as
these are mostly later in date than the Lante grounds,
priority of invention may be claimed for the designer
of the latter. It was undoubtedly from the Italian park
of the Renaissance that Le Notre learned the use of the
woodland as an adjunct to the garden ; but in France
these parks had for the most part to be planted, whereas
in Italy the garden-architect could use the natural
woodland, which was usually hilly, and the effects thus
produced were far more varied and interesting than
those possible in the flat artificial parks of France.

II

VILLA d'eSTE

Of the three great villas built by cardinals beyond the
immediate outskirts of Rome, the third and the most
famous is the Villa d'Este at Tivoli.

139

ITALIAN VILLAS

Begun before 1540 by the Cardinal Bishop of Cor-
dova, the villa became the property of Cardinal Ippolito
d'Este, son of Alfonso I of Ferrara, who carried on its
embellishment at the cost of over a million Roman
scudi. Thence it passed successively to two other
cardinals of the house of Este, who continued its
adornment, and finally, in the seventeenth century, was
inherited by the ducal house of Modena.

The villa, an unfinished barrack-like building, stands
on a piazza at one end of the town of Tivoli, above
gardens which descend the steep hillside to the gorge
of the Anio. These gardens have excited so much
admiration that little thought has been given to the
house, though it is sufficiently interesting to merit
attention. It is said to have been built by Pirro Ligo-
rio, and surprising as it seems that this huge featureless
pile should have been designed by the creator of the
Casino del Papa, yet one observes that the rooms are
decorated with the same fantastic pebble-work used in
such profusion at the Villa Pia. In extenuation of the
ugliness of the Villa d'Este it should, moreover, be
remembered that its long fagade is incomplete, save for
the splendid central portico ; and also that, while the
Villa Pia was intended as shelter for a summer after-
noon, the great palace at Tivoli was planned to house a
cardinal and his guests, including, it is said, "a suite of
two hundred and fifty gentlemen of the noblest blood
of Italy." When one pictures such a throng, with their

140

THE POOL, VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLl

VILLAS NEAR ROME

innumerable retainers, it is easy to understand why
the Villa d'Este had to be expanded out of all likeness
to an ordinary country house.

The plan is ingenious and interesting. From the vil-
lage square only a high blank wall is visible. Through
a door in this wall one passes into a frescoed corridor
which leads to a court enclosed in an open arcade, with
fountains in rusticated niches. From a corner of the
court a fine intramural stairway descends to what is, on
the garden side, the piano iiobile of the villa. On this
side, looking over the gardens, is a long enfilade of
rooms, gaily frescoed by the Zuccheri and their school;
and behind the rooms runs a vaulted corridor built
against the side of the hill, and lighted by bull's-eyes in
its roof. This corridor has lost its frescoes, but preserves
a line of niches decorated in coloured pebbles and stucco-
work, with gaily painted stucco caryatids supporting the
arches ; and as each niche contains a semicircular foun-
tain, the whole length of the corridor must once have
rippled with running water.

The central room opens on the great two-storied por-
tico or loggia, whence one descends by an outer stair-
way to a terrace running the length of the building, and
terminated at one end by an ornamental wall, at the
other by an open loggia overlooking the Campagna.
From this upper terrace, with its dense wall of box and
laurel, one looks down on the towering cypresses and
ilexes of the lower gardens. The grounds are not large,

19

ITALIAN VILLAS

but the impression produced is full of a tragic grandeur.
The villa towers above so high and bare, the descent
from terrace to terrace is so long and steep, there are
such depths of mystery in the infinite green distances
and in the cypress-shaded pools of the lower garden,
that one has a sense of awe rather than of pleasure in
descending from one level to another of darkly rustling
green. But it is the omnipresent rush of water which
gives the Este gardens their peculiar character. From
the Anio, drawn up the hillside at incalculable cost and
labour, a thousand rills gush downward, terrace by ter-
race, channelling the stone rails of the balusters, leaping
from step to step, dripping into mossy conchs, flashing
in spray from the horns of sea-gods and the jaws of
mythical monsters, or forcing themselves in irrepressible
overflow down the ivy-matted banks. The whole length
of the second terrace is edged by a deep stone channel,
into which the stream drips by countless outlets over a
quivering fringe of maidenhair. Every side path or
flight of steps is accompanied by its sparkling rill, every
niche in the retaining-walls has its water-pouring nymph
or gushing urn ; the solemn depths of green reverberate
with the tumult of innumerable streams. "The Anio,"
as Herr Tuckermann says, "throbs through the whole
organism of the garden like its inmost vital principle."

The gardens of the Villa d'Este were probably begun
by Pirro Ligorio, and, as Herr Gurlitt thinks, continued
later by Giacomo della Porta. It will doubtless never

144

VILLA LANTE, BAGNAIA

VILLAS NEAR ROME

be known how much Ligorio owed to the taste of Orazio
OHvieri, the famous hydraulic engineer, who raised the
Anio to the hilltop and organized its distribution through
the grounds. But it is apparent that the whole compo-
sition was planned about the central fact of the rushing
Anio : that the gardens were to be, as it were, an organ
on which the water played. The result is extraordinarily
romantic and beautiful, and the versatility with which
the stream is used, the varying effects won from it, bear
witness to the imaginative feeling of the designer.

When all has been said in praise of the poetry and
charm of the Este gardens, it must be owned that from
the architect's standpoint they are less satisfying than
those of the other great cinque-cento villas. The plan
is worthy of all praise, but the details are too compli-
cated, and the ornament is either trivial or cumbrous.
So inferior is the architecture to that of the Lante gar-
dens and Caprarola that Burckhardt was probably right
in attributing much of it to the seventeenth century.
Here for the first time one feels the heavy touch of the
baroque. The fantastic mosaic and stucco temple con-
taining the water-organ above the great cascade, the
arches of triumph, the celebrated "grotto of Arethusa,"
the often-sketched fountain on the second terrace, all
seem pitiably tawdry when compared with the garden-
architecture of Raphael or Vignola. Some of the details
of the composition are absolutely puerile — such as the
toy model of an ancient city, thought to be old Rome,

147

ITALIAN VILLAS

and perhaps suggested by the miniature "Valley of
Canopus " in the neighbouring Villa of Hadrian ; and
there are endless complications of detail, where the
earlier masters would have felt the need of breadth and
simplicity. Above all, there is a want of harmony be-
tween the landscape and its treatment. The baroque
garden-architecture of Italy is not without charm, and
even a touch of the grotesque has its attraction in the
fiat gardens of Lombardy or the sunny Euganeans;
but the cypress-groves of the Villa d'Este are too
solemn, and the Roman landscape is too august, to
suffer the nearness of the trivial.

Ill

FRASCATI

The most famous group of villas in the Roman
country-side lies on the hill above Frascati. Here,
in the middle of the sixteenth century, Flaminio Pon-
zio built the palace of Mondragone for Cardinal
Scipione Borghese.' Aloft among hanging ilex-woods
rises the mighty pile on its projecting basement. This
fortress-like ground floor, with high-placed grated win-
dows, is common to all the earlier villas on the brig-
and-haunted slopes of Frascati. An avenue of ancient
ilexes (now cruelly cut down) leads up through the park
to the villa, which is preceded by a great walled

' The villa was begun by Martino Lunghi the Elder, in 1567, for the Cardinal
Marco d' Altemps, enlarged by Pope Gregory VII, and completed by Paul V and
his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. See Gustav Ebe, " Die Spatrenaissance."

148

CASCADE AND ROTUNDA, VILLA ALDOBRANDINl, FRASCATI

VILLAS NEAR ROME

courtyard, with fountains in the usual rusticated niches.
To the right of this court is another, flanked by the
splendid loggia of Vignola, with the Borghese eagles
and dragons alternating in its sculptured spandrels,
and a vaulted ceiling adorned with stucchi — one of the
most splendid pieces of garden-architecture in Italy.

At the other end of this inner court, which was for-
merly a flower-garden, Giovanni Fontana, whose name
is identified with the fountains of Frascati, constructed a
theatre cfeaii, raised above the court, and approached
by a double ramp elaborately inlaid in mosaic. This
ornate composition, with a series of mosaic niches sim-
ulating arcaded galleries in perspective, is now in ruins,
and the most impressive thing about Mondragone is the
naked majesty of its great terrace, unadorned save by a
central fountain and two tall twisted columns, and look-
ing out over the wooded slopes of the park to Frascati,
the Campagna, and the sea.

On a neighbouring height lies the more famous Villa
Aldobrandini, built for the cardinal of that name by
Giacomo della Porta in 1598, and said by Evelyn, who
saw it fifty years later, "to surpass the most delicious
places ... for its situation, elegance, plentiful water,
groves, ascents and prospects."

The house itself does not bear comparison with such
buildings as the Villa Medici or the Villa Pamphily. In
style it shows the first stage of the baroque, before that
school had found its formula. Like all the hill -built
villas of Frascati, it is a story lower at the back than in

ITALIAN VILLAS

front; and the roof of this lower story forms at each end
a terrace level with the first-floor windows. These
terraces are adorned with two curious turrets, resting
on baroque basements and crowned by swallow-tailed
crenellations — a fantastic reversion to mediaevalism,
more suggestive of "Strawberry Hill Gothic" than of
the Italian seventeenth century.

Orazio Olivieri and Giovanni Fontana are said to
have collaborated with Giacomo della Porta in design-
ing the princely gardens of the villa. Below the house
a series of splendid stone terraces lead to a long tapis
vert, with an ilex avenue down its centre, which
descends to the much-admired grille of stone and
wrought-iron enclosing the grounds at the foot of the
hill. Behind the villa, in a semicircle cut out of the
hillside, is Fontana's famous water-theatre, of which
Evelyn gives a picturesque description: "Just behind
the Palace . . . rises a high hill or mountain all overclad
with tall wood, and so formed by nature as if it had
been cut out by art, from the summit of which falls a
cascade . . . precipitating into a large theatre of water.
Under this is an artificial grot wherein are curious
rocks, hydraulic organs, and all sorts of singing birds,
moving and chirping by force of the water, with several
other pageants and surprising inventions. In the centre
of one of these rooms rises a copper ball that continually
dances about three feet above the pavement, by virtue
of a wind conveyed secretly to a hole beneath it ; with

I ^2

GARDEN OF VILLA LANCELLOTTI, FRASCATI

VILLAS NEAR ROME

many other devices for wetting the unwary spectators,
... In one of these theatres of water is an Atlas
spouting, . . . and another monster makes a terrible
roaring with a horn ; but, above all, the representation
of a storm is most natural, with such fury of rain, wind
and thunder as one would imagine oneself in some
extreme tempest."

Atlas and the monster are silent, and the tempest has
ceased to roar ; but the architecture of the great water-
theatre remains intact. It has been much extolled by so
good a critic as Herr Gurlitt, yet compared with Vi-
gnola's loggia at Mondragone or the terrace of the Orti
Farnesiani, it is a heavy and uninspired production. It
suffers also from too great proximity to the villa, and
from being out of scale with the latter's modest eleva-
tion : there is a distinct lack of harmony between the
two facades. But even Evelyn could not say too much
in praise of the glorious descent of the cascade from the
hilltop. It was in the guidance of rushing water that
the Roman garden-architects of the seventeenth century
showed their poetic feeling and endless versatility ; and
the architecture of the upper garden at the Aldobrandini
merits all the admiration which has been wasted on its
pompous theatre.

Another example of a theatre d'eau, less showy but
far more beautiful, is to be seen at the neighbouring Villa
Conti (now Torlonia). Of the formal gardens of this
villa there remain only the vast terraced stairways which

155

ITALIAN VILLAS

now lead to an ilex-grove level with the first story of
the villa. This grove is intersected by mossy alleys,
leading to circular clearings where fountains overflow
their wide stone basins, and benches are ranged about
in the deep shade. The central alley, on the axis of the
villa, leads through the w^ood to a great grassy semi-
circle at the foot of an ilex-clad hill. The base of the
hillside is faced with a long arcade of twenty niches,
divided by pilasters, and each containing a fountain. In
the centre is a great baroque pile of rock-w^ork, from
which the spray tosses into a semicircular basin, which
also receives the cascade descending from the hilltop.
This cascade is the most beautiful example of fountain-
architecture in Frascati. It falls by a series of inclined
stone ledges into four oval basins, each a little wider
than the one above it. On each side, stone steps which
follow the curves of the basins lead to a grassy plateau
above, with a balustraded terrace overhanging the rush
of the cascade. The upper plateau is enclosed in ilexes,
and in its centre is one of the most beautiful fountains
in Italy — a large basin surrounded by a richly sculp-
tured balustrade. The plan of this fountain is an inter-
esting example of the variety which the Italian garden-
architects gave to the outline of their basins. Even in
the smaller gardens the plan of these basins is varied
with taste and originality ; and the small wall-fountains
are also worthy of careful study.

Among the villas of Frascati there are two, less

156

CASINO, VILLA FALCONIERl, FRASCATI

"MflT F ^^^^^^^H

VILLAS NEAR ROME

famous than the foregoing, but even more full of a
romantic charm. One is the \^illa Muti, a mile or two
beyond the town, on the way to Grotta Ferrata. From
the gate three ancient ilex avenues lead to the villa, the
central one being on the axis of the lowest garden. The
ground rises gradually toward the house, and the space
between the ilex avenues w^as probably once planted in
formal boschi, as fragments of statuary are still seen
among the trees. The house, set against the hillside,
with the usual fortress-like basement, is two stories
lower toward the basse-cour than toward the gardens.
The avenue to the left of the entrance leads to a small
garden, probably once a court, in front of the villa,
whence one looks down over a mighty retaining-wall at
the basse-coiir on the left. On the right, divided from
the court by a low wall surmounted by vases, lies the
most beautiful box-garden in Italy, laid out in an elab-
orate geometrical design, and enclosed on three sides by
high clipped walls of box and laurel, and on the fourth
by a retaining-wall which sustains an upper garden.
Nothing can surpass the hushed and tranquil beauty of
the scene. There are no flowers or bright colours — only
the contrasted tints of box and ilex and laurel, and the
vivid green of the moss spreading over damp paths and
ancient stonework.

In the upper garden, which is of the same length but
narrower, the box-parterres are repeated. This garden,
at the end nearest the villa, has a narrow raised terrace,

159

ITALIAN VILLAS

with an elaborate architectural retaining-vvall, containing
a central fountain in stucco-work. Steps flanked by-
statues lead up to this fountain, and thence one passes
by another flight of steps to the third, or upper, garden,
which is level with the back of the villa. This third
garden, the largest of the three, was once also laid out
in formal parterres and bosquets set with statues, and
though it has now been remodelled in the landscape
style, its old plan may still be traced. Before it was
destroyed the three terraces of the Villa Muti must have
formed the most enchanting garden in Frascati, and
their plan and architectural details are worthy of careful
study, for they belong to the rare class of small Italian
gardens where grandeur was less sought for than charm
and sylvan seclusion, and where the Latin passion for
the monumental was subordinated to a desire for mod-
eration and simplicity.

The Villa Falconieri, on the hillside below Mondra-
gone, is remarkable for the wealth of its garden-archi-
tecture. The grounds are entered by two splendid
stone gateways, the upper one being on an axis with the
villa. A grass avenue leads from this gate to an arch
of triumph, a rusticated elevation with niches and
statues, surmounted by the inscription " Horatius Fal-
conieris," and giving access to the inner grounds.
Hence a straight avenue runs between formal ilex-
groves to the court before the house. On the right,
above the bosco, is a lofty wall of rock, picturesquely

1 60

THE ENTRANCE, VILLA FALCONIERI, FRASCATI

VILLAS NEAR ROME

overgrown by shrubs and creepers, with busts and
other fragments of antique sculpture set here and there
on its projecting ledges. This natural cliff sustains an
upper plateau, where there is an oblong artificial water
(called "the lake") enclosed in rock-work and sur-
rounded by a grove of mighty cypresses. From this
shady solitude the wooded slopes of the lower park are
reached by a double staircase so simple and majestic in
design that it harmonizes perfectly with the sylvan wild-
ness which characterizes the landscape. This staircase
should be studied as an example of the way in which
the Italian garden-architects could lay aside exuberance
and whimsicality when their work was intended to blend
with some broad or solemn effect of nature.

The grounds of the Villa Falconieri were laid out by
Cardinal Ruffini in the first half of the sixteenth century,
but the villa was not built till 1648. It is one of the
most charming creations of Borromini, that brilliant
artist in whom baroque architecture found its happiest
expression; and the Villa Falconieri makes one regret
that he did not oftener exercise his fancy in the con-
struction of such pleasure-houses. The elevation
follows the tradition of the Roman villa siibiirbana.
The centre of the ground floor is an arcaded loggia,
the roof of which forms a terrace to the recessed story
above ; while the central motive of this first story is
another semicircular recess, adorned with stucco orna-
ment and surmounted by a broken pediment. The

163

ITALIAN VILLAS

attic story is set still farther back, so that its balustraded
roof-Une forms a background for the richly decorated
facade, and the building, though large, thus preserves
the airy look and lightness of proportion which had
come to be regarded as suited to the suburban pleasure-
house.

To the right of the villa, the composition is prolonged
by a gateway with coupled columns surmounted by
stone dogs, and leading from the forecourt to the
adjoining basse-coiir. About the latter are grouped a
number of low farm-buildings, to which a touch of the
baroque gives picturesqueness. In the charm of its
elevation, and in the happy juxtaposition of garden-
walls and outbuildings, the Villa Falconieri forms the
most harmonious and successful example of garden-
architecture in Frascati.

The elevation which most resembles it is that of the
Villa Lancellotti. Here the house, which is probably
nearly a century earlier, shows the same happy use of
the open loggia, which in this case forms the central
feature of the first story, above a stately pedimented
doorway. The loggia is surmounted by a kind of
square-headed gable crowned by a balustrade with
statues, and the facade on each side of this central com-
position is almost Tuscan in its severity. Before the
house lies a beautiful box-garden of intricate design,
enclosed in high walls of ilex, with the inevitable tlicdtre
d'eau at its farther end. This is a semicircular compo-

164

VILLA LAiNCELLOTTI, FRASCATI

VILLAS NEAR ROME

sition, with statues in niches between rusticated pilasters,
and a central grotto whence a fountain pours into a
wide balustraded basin ; the whole being surmounted
by another balustrade, with a statue set on each pier.
It is harmonious and dignified in design, but unfor-
tunately a fresh coating of brown and yellow paint has
destroyed that exquisite patina by means of which the
climate of Italy effects the gradual blending of nature
and architecture.

167

GENOESE VILLAS

1

VILLA SCASSl, GENOA

V

GENOESE VILLAS

GENOA, one of the most splendour-loving cities
in Italy, had almost always to import her
splendour. In reading Soprani's " Lives of the
Genoese Painters, Sculptors and Architects," one is
struck by the fact that, with few exceptions, these wor-
thies were Genoese only in the sense of having placed
their talents at the service of the merchant princes who
reared the marble city above its glorious harbour.

The strength of the race lay in other directions ; but,
as is often the case with what may be called people of
secondary artistic instincts, the Genoese pined for the
beauty they could not create, and in the sixteenth cen-
tury they called artists from all parts of Italy to embody
their conceptions of magnificence. Two of the most
famous of these. Era Montorsoli and Pierin del Vaga,
came from Florence, Galeazzo Alessi from Perugia,
Giovanni Battista Castello from Bergamo; and it is to
the genius of these four men, sculptor, painter, architect,
and shtccatore (and each more or less versed in the
crafts of the (Others), that Genoa owes the greater part
of her magnificence.

ITALIAN VILLAS

Fra Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli, the Florentine, must
here be named first, since his chief work, the Palazzo
Andrea Doria, built in 1529, is the earliest of the great
Genoese villas. It is also the most familiar to modern
travelers, for the other beautiful country houses which
formerly crowned the heights above Genoa, from Pegli
to Nervi, have now been buried in the growth of manu-
facturing suburbs, so that only the diligent seeker after
villa-architecture will be likely to come upon their ruined
gardens and peeling stucco facades among the factory
chimneys of Sampierdarena or the squalid tenements
of San Fruttuoso.

The great Andrea Doria, "Admiral of the Navies of
the Pope, the Emperor, the King of France and the
Republic of Genoa," in 1521 bought the villas Lomel-
lini and Giustiniani, on the western shore of the port
of Genoa, and throwing the two estates together, cre-
ated a villa wherein " to enjoy in peace the fruits of an
honoured life" — so runs the inscription on the outer
wall of the house.

Fra Montorsoli was first and foremost a sculptor, a
pupil of Michelangelo's, a plastic artist to whom archi-
tecture was probably of secondary interest. Partly per-
haps for this reason, and also because the Villa Doria
was in great measure designed to show the frescoes of
Pierin del Vaga, there is little elaboration in its treat-
ment. Yet the continuous open loggia on the ground
floor, and the projecting side colonnades enclosing the

174

GENOESE VILLAS

upper garden, give an airy elegance to the water-front,
and make it, in combination with its mural paintings
and stucco-ornamentation, and the sculpture of the gar-
dens, one of the most villa-like of Italian villas. The
gardens themselves descend in terraces to the shore,
and contain several imposing marble fountains, among
them one with a statue of Neptune, executed in 1600 by
the Carloni, and supposed to be a portrait of the great
Admiral.

The house stands against a steep terraced hillside,
formerly a part of the grounds, but now unfortunately
divided from them by the railway cutting. A wide
tapis vert still ascends the hill to a colossal Jupiter
(under which the Admiral's favourite dog is said to be
buried); and when the villa is seen from the harbour one
understands how necessary this stately terraced back-
ground was to the setting of the low-lying building.
Beautiful indeed must have been the surroundings of
the villa when Evelyn visited it in 1644, and described
the marble terraces above the sea, the aviary "wherein
grew trees of more than two feet in diameter, besides
cypress, myrtles, lentiscuses and other rare shrubs," and
"the other two gardens full of orange-trees, citrons and
pomegranates, fountains, grots and statues." All but
the statues have now disappeared, yet much of the old
garden-magic lingers in the narrow strip between house
and sea. It is the glory of the Italian garden-architects
that neglect and disintegration cannot wholly mar the

175

ITALIAN VILLAS

effects they were skilled in creating : effects due to such
a fine sense of proportion, to so exquisite a perception
of the relation between architecture and landscape, be-
tween verdure and marble, that while a trace of their
plan remains one feels the spell of the whole.

When Rubens came to Genoa in 1607 he was so
impressed by the magnificence of its great street of
palaces — the lately built Strada Nuova — that he re-
corded his admiration in a series of etchings, published
in Antwerp in 1622 under the title " Palazzi di Geneva,"
a priceless document for the student of Renaissance
architecture in Italy, since the Flemish master did not con-
tent himself with mere impressionist sketches, like Cana-
letto's fanciful Venetian etchings, but made careful archi-
tectural drawings and bird's-eye views of all the prmcipal
Genoese palaces. As many of these buildings have since
been altered, Rubens's volume has the additional value
of preserving a number of interesting details which might
never have been recovered by subsequent study.

The Strada Nuova of Genoa, planned by Galeazzo
Alessi between 1550 and 1560, is the earliest example
in Europe of a street laid out by an architect with delib-
erate artistic intent, and designed to display the palaces
with which he subsequently lined it. Hitherto, streets
had formed themselves on the natural lines of traffic, and
individual houses had sprung up along them without
much regard to the site or style of their nearest neigh-
bors. The Strada Nuova, on the contrary, was planned

176

GENOESE VILLAS

and carried out homogeneously, and was thus the pro-
genitor of all the great street plans of modern Europe —
of the Place Royale and the Place Vendome in Paris, the
great Place at Nancy, the grouping of Palladian palaces
about the Basilica of Vicenza, and all subsequent attempts
to create an organic whole out of a number of adjacent
buildings. Even Lenfant's plan of Washington may be
said to owe its first impulse to the Perugian architect's
conception of a street of palaces.

When Alessi projected this great work he had open
ground to build on, though, as Evelyn remarked, the
rich Genoese merchants had, like the Hollanders, "little
or no extent of ground to employ their estates in."
Still, there was space enough to permit of spreading
porticoes and forecourts, and to one of the houses in the
Strada Nuova Alessi gave the ample development and
airy proportions of a true villa siibiirbana. This is the
Palazzo Parodi, which, like the vanished Sauli palace,
shows, instead of the block plan of the city dwelling, a
central corps de bdtinient with pavilions crowned by
open loggias, and a rusticated screen dividing the court
from the street. It is curious that, save in the case of
the beautiful Villa Sauli (now completely rebuilt), Alessi
did not repeat this appropriate design in the country
houses with which he adorned the suburbs of Genoa —
those " ravishing retirements of the Genoese nobility "
which prolonged the splendour of the city for miles along
the coast. Of his remaining villas, all are built on the

177

ITALIAN VILLAS

block plan, or with but slight projections, and rich though
they are in detail, and stately in general composition,
they lack that touch of fantasy which the Roman villa-
architects knew how to impart.

Before pronouncing this a defect, however, one must
consider the different conditions under which Alessi and
his fellow-architects in Genoa had to work. Annibale
Lippi, Pirro Ligorio, Giacomo della Porta and Carlo
Borromini reared their graceful loggias and stretched
their airy colonnades against masses of luxuriant foliage
and above a far- spreading landscape,

wonderful
To the sea's edge for gloss and gloom,

while Alessi and Montorsoli had to place their country
houses on narrow ledges of waterless rock, with a thin
coating of soil parched by the wind, and an outlook
over the serried roofs and crowded shipping of a com-
mercial city. The Genoese gardens are mere pockets
of earth in coigns of masonry, where a few olives and
bay-trees fight the sun-glare and sea-wind of a harsh
winter and a burning summer. The beauty of the
prospect consists in the noble outline of the harbour,
enclosed in exquisitely modelled but leafless hills, and
in the great blue stretch of sea on which, now and then,
the mountains of Corsica float for a moment. It will
be seen that, amid such surroundings, the architectural
quality must predominate over the picturesque or natu-

■ 78

GENOESE VILLAS

ralistic. Not only the natural restrictions of site and soil,
but the severity of the landscape and the nearness of a
great city, made it necessary that the Genoese villa-
architects should produce their principal effects by means
of masonry and sculpture, rather than of water and ver-
dure. The somewhat heavy silhouette of the Genoese
country houses is thus perhaps partly explained ; for
where the garden had to be a stone monument, it would
have been illogical to make the house less massive.

The most famous of Alessi's vHlas lies in the once
fashionable suburb of Sampierdarena, to the west of
Genoa. Here, along the shore, were clustered the
most beautiful pleasure-houses of the merchant princes.
The greater number have now been turned into tene-
ments for factory-workers, or into actual factories, while
the beautiful gardens descending to the sea have been
cut in half by the railway and planted with cabbages
and mulberries. Amid this labyrinth of grimy walls,
crumbling loggias and waste ground heaped with mel-
ancholy refuse, it is not easy to find one's way to the
Villa Imperiali (now Scassi), the masterpiece of Alessi,
which stands as a solitary witness to the former " ravish-
ments" of Sampierdarena. By a happy chance this villa
has become the property of the municipality, which has
turned the house into a girls' school, while the grounds
are used as a public garden ; and so well have house
and grounds been preserved that the student of archi-
tecture may here obtain a good idea of the magnificence

179

ITALIAN VILLAS

with which the Genoese nobles surrounded even their
few weeks of villcggiatiira. To match such magnifi-
cence, one must look to one of the great villas of the
Roman cardinals ; and, with the exception of the Villa
Doria Pamphily (which is smaller) and of the \'illa
Albani, it would be difficult to cite an elevation where
palatial size is combined with such lavish richness of
ornament.

Alessi was once thought to have studied in Rome
under Michelangelo ; but Herr Gurlitt shows that the
latter was absent from Rome from 151 6 to 1535 — that
is, precisely during what must have been the formative
period of Alessi's talent. The Perugian architect
certainly shows little trace of Michelangelesque influ-
ences, but seems to derive rather from the school of his
own great contemporary, Palladio.

The Villa Scassi, with its Tuscan order below and
fluted Corinthian pilasters above, its richly carved frieze
and cornice, and its beautiful roof-balustrade, is perhaps
more familiar to students than any other example of
Genoese suburban architecture. Almost alone among
Genoese villas, it stands at the foot of a hill, with gar-
dens rising behind it instead of descending below it to
the sea. Herr Gurlitt thinks these grounds are among
the earliest in Italy in which the narrow mediaeval Jiortus
inchtsus was blent with the wider lines of the landscape ;
indeed, he makes the somewhat surprising statement that
" all the later garden-craft has its source in Alessi, who,

180

A GARDEN-NICHE, VILLA SCASSI, GENOA

fe

GENOESE VILLAS

in the Scassi gardens, has shown to the full his charac-
teristic gift for preserving unity of conception in multi-
plicity of form."

There could be no better definition of the garden-
science of the Italian Renaissance ; and if, as it seems
probable, the Scassi gardens are earlier in date than the
Boboli and the Orti Farnesiani, they certainly fill an
important place in the evolution of the pleasure-ground ;
but the Vatican gardens, if they were really designed by
Antonio da Sangallo, must still be regarded as the
source from which the later school of landscape-archi-
tects drew their first inspiration. It was certainly here,
and in the unfinished gardens of the Villa Madama,
that the earliest attempts were made to bring the un-
tamed forms of nature into relation with the disciplined
lines of architecture.

Herr Gurlitt is, however, quite right in calling atten-
tion to the remarkable manner in which the architectural
lines of the Scassi gardens have been adapted to their
site, and also to the skill with which Alessi contrived
the successive transition from the formal surroundings
of the house to the sylvan freedom of the wooded hill-
top beneath which it lies.

A broad terrace, gently sloping with the natural grade
of the land, leads up to a long level walk beneath the
high retaining-wall which sustains the second terrace.
In the centre of this retaining-wall is a beautifully de-
signed triple niche, divided by Atlantides supporting a

183

ITALIAN VILLAS

delicately carved entablature, while a double flight of
steps encloses this central composition. Niches with
statues and marble seats also adorn the lateral walls of
the gardens, and on the upper terrace is a long tank or
canal, flanked by clipped shrubs and statues. Thence
an inclined path leads to a rusticated temple with co-
lomies torses, and statues in niches above fluted basins
into which water once flowed ; and beyond this there is
a winding ascent to the grove which crowns the hill.
All the architectural details of the garden are remark-
able for a classical purity and refinement, except the
rusticated temple, of which the fantastic columns are
carved to resemble tree-trunks. This may be of later
date ; but if contemporary, its baroque style was prob-
ably intended to mark the transition from the formality
of the lower gardens to the rustic character of the natu-
ralistic landscape above — to form, in fact, a gate from
the garden to the park.

The end of the sixteenth century saw this gradual
recognition of nature, and adoption of her forms, in the
architecture and sculpture of the Italian pleasure-house,
and more especially in those outlying constructions
which connected the formal and the sylvan portions of
the grounds. 'Tn mid-Renaissance garden-architecture,"
as Herr Tuckermann puts it, " the relation between art
and landscape is reversed. Previously the garden had
had to adapt itself to architecture ; now architectural
forms are forced into a resemblance with nature."

184

GENOESE' VILLAS

Bernini was the great exponent of this new impulse,
though it may be traced back as far as Michelangelo.
It was Bernini who first expressed in his fountains the
tremulous motion and shifting curves of water, and who
put into his garden-sculpture that rustle oi piein air
which the modern painter seeks to express in his land-
scapes. To trace the gradual development of this rap-
prochement to nature at a period so highly artificial
would be beyond the scope of these articles ; but in
judging the baroque garden architecture and sculpture
of the late Renaissance, it should be remembered that
they are not the expression of a wilful eccentricity, but
an attempted link between the highly conventionalized
forms of urban art and that life of the fields and woods
which was beginning to charm the imagination of poets
and painters.

On the height above the Acqua Sola gardens, on the
eastern side of Genoa, lies Alessi's other great country
house, the Villa Pallavicini alle Peschiere — not to be
confounded with the ridiculous Villa Pallavicini at Pegli,
a brummagem creation of the early nineteenth century,
to which the guide-books still send throngs of unsus-
pecting tourists, who come back imagining that this
tawdry jumble of weeping willows and Chinese pagodas,
mock Gothic ruins and exotic vegetation, represents the
typical "Itahan garden," of which so much is said and
so little really known.

The Villa Pallavicini alle Peschiere (a drawing of

185

ITALIAN VILLAS

which may be seen in Rubens's collection) is in site
and design a typical Genoese suburban house of the
sixteenth century. The lower story has a series of
arched windows between Ionic pilasters; above are
square-headed windows with upper lights, divided by
fluted Corinthian pilasters and surmounted by a beau-
tiful cornice and a roof-balustrade of unusual design,
in which groups of balusters alternate with oblong
panels of richly carved openwork. The very slightly
projecting wings have, on both stories, arched recesses
in which heroic statues are painted in grisaille.

The narrow ledge of ground on which the villa is
built permits only of a broad terrace in front of the house,
with a central basin surmounted by a beautiful winged
figure and enclosed in stone-edged flower-beds. Stately
flights of steps lead down to a lower terrace, of which
the mighty retaining-wall is faced by a Doric portico,
with a recessed loggia behind it. From this level other
flights of steps, flanked by great balustraded walls nearly
a hundred feet high, descend to a third terrace, narrower-
than the others, whence one looks down into lower-
lying gardens, wedged into every projecting shelf of
ground between palace roofs and towering slopes of
masonry; while directly beneath this crowded foreground
sparkles the blue expanse of the Mediterranean.

On a higher ledge, above the Villa Pallavicini, lies the
Villa Durazzo-Grapollo, perhaps also a work of Alessi's.
Here the unusual extent of ground about the house has

1 86

GENOESE VILLAS

permitted an interesting development of landscape-archi-
tecture. A fine pedimented gateway with rusticated piers
gives admission to a straight avenue of plane-trees lead-
ing up to the house, which is a dignified building with
two stories, a ineszaniii and an attic. The windows on
the ground floor are square-headed, with oblong sunk
panels above; while on the first floor there is a slightly
baroque movement about the architraves, and every other
window is surmounted by a curious shell-shaped pedi-
ment. On the garden side a beautiful marble balcony
forms the central motive of the piano iiobile, and the
roof is enclosed in a balustrade with alternate solid
panels and groups of balusters. The plan is oblong,
with slightly projecting wings, adorned on both stories
with coupled pilasters, which on the lower floor are rus-
ticated and above are fluted Corinthian, painted on the
stucco surface of the house. This painting of archi-
tectural ornament is very characteristic of Genoese
architecture, and was done with such skill that, at a
little distance, it is often impossible to distinguish a
projecting architectural member from its frescoed coun-
terfeit.

In front of the villa is a long narrow formal garden,
supported on three sides by a lofty retaining- wall. Down
the middle of this garden, on an axis with the central
doorway of the fagade, runs a canal terminated by
reclining figures of river-gods and marble dolphins
spouting water. An ilex-walk flanks it on each side,

187

ITALIAN VILLAS

and at the farther end a balustrade encloses this upper
garden, and two flights of steps, with the usual central
niche, lead to the next level. Here there is a much
greater extent of ground, and the old formal lines have
been broken up into the winding paths and shrubberies
o{2u J ardin anglais. Even here, however, traces of the ori-
ginal plan may be discovered, and statues and fountains
are scattered with charming effect among the irregular
plantations, while paths between clipped walls of green
lead to beautiful distant views of the sea and moun-
tains. Specially interesting is the treatment of the
lateral retaining- walls of the upper garden. In these
immense ramparts of masonry have been cut tunnels
decorated with shellwork and stucco ornament, which
lead up by a succession of wide steps to the ground on
a level with the house. One of these tunnels contains a
series of pools of water, which finally pour into a stream
winding through a romantic boscJietto on a lower
level. Here, as at the Villa Scassi, all the garden-
architecture is pure and dignified in style, and there is
great beauty in the broad and simple treatment of the
upper terrace, with its canal and ilex-walks.

From the terraces of the Villa Durazzo one looks
forth over the hillside of San Francesco d'Albaro, the
suburb which balances Sampierdarena on the east.
Happily this charming district is still a fashionable
villeggi-atura, and the houses which Alessi built on its
slopes s'-and above an almost unaltered landscape of

i88

GENOESE VILLAS

garden and vineyard. A fine road crosses the Bisagno
and leads up between high walls and beautiful hanging
gardens, passing at every turn some charming villa-
fagade in its setting of cypresses and camellias. Among
these, one should not overlook the exquisite little Para-
disino, a pale-green toy villa with Ionic pilasters and
classic pediment, perched above a high terrace on the
left of the ascent.

Just above stands the Paradiso (or Villa Cambiaso),
another masterpiece of Alessi's," to which it is almost
impossible to obtain admission. Unfortunately, the
house stands far back from the road, above intervening
terraces and groves, and one can obtain only an imper-
fect glimpse of its beautiful facade, which is as ornate
and imposing as that of the Villa Scassi, and of garden-
walks lined with clipped hedges and statues.

At Alessi's other Villa Cambiaso, higher up the hill
of San Francesco d'Albaro, a more hospitable welcome
awaits the sight-seer. Here admission is easily obtained,
and it is possible to study and photograph at leisure.
This villa is remarkable for the beauty of the central
loggia on the ground floor of the fagade : a grand
Doric arcade, leading into a two-storied atrium de-
signed in the severest classical spirit. So suggestive is
this of the great loggia of the Villa Bombicci, near Flor-
ence, that one understands why Alessi was called the

■ In his " Baukunst der Renaissance in Italian " (Part II, Vol. V) Dr. Josef
Durm, without citing his authority, says that the Villa Paradiso was built in
1600 by Andrea Ceresola, called Vanove.

189

ITALIAN VILLAS

pupil of Michelangelo. At the back of the house
there is (as at the Villa Bombicci) a fine upper loggia,
and the wide spacing of the windows on the ground
floor, and the massiveness and simplicity of all the
architectural details, inevitably recall the Tuscan style.
Little is left of the old gardens save a tapis vert flanked
by clipped hedges, which descends to an iron grille on
a lower road ; but the broad grassy space about the
house has a boundary-wall with a continuous marble
bench, like that at the Villa Pia in the Vatican gardens.
In the valley between San Francesco d'Albaro and
the Bisagno lies the dismal suburb of San Fruttuoso.
Here one must seek, through a waste of dusty streets
lined with half-finished tenements, for what must once
have been the most beautiful of Genoese pleasure-
houses — the Villa Imperiali, probably built by Fra Mon-
torsoli. It stands high above broad terraced grounds
of unusual extent, backed by a hanging wood ; but
all the old gardens have been destroyed, save the
beautiful upper terrace, and even the house has suffered
some injury, though not enough to detract greatly from
its general effect. Here at last one finds that union
of lightness and majesty which characterizes the Villa
Medici and other Roman houses of its kind. The long
elevation, with wings set back, has a rusticated base-
ment, surmounted by two stories and an attic above
the cornice. There is no order, but the whole facade
is richly frescoed in a severe architectural style, with

190

GENOESE VILLAS

niches, statues in grisaille, and other ornaments, all
executed by a skilful hand. The windows on the first
floor have broken pediments with a shell-like move-
ment, and those above show the same treatment, alter-
nating with the usual triangular pediment. But the
crowning distinction of the house consists in the two
exquisite loggias which form the angles of the second
story. These tall arcades, resting on slender columns,
give a wonderful effect of spreading lightness to the
fagadc, and break up its great bulk without disturbing
the general impression of strength and dignity. As a
skilful distribution of masses the elevation of the Villa
Imperiali deserves the most careful study, and it is to
be regretted that it can no longer be seen in combina-
tion with the wide-spread terraces which once formed a
part of its composition.

191

LOMBARD VILLAS

VILLA CICOGNA, BISUSCHIO

VI
LOMBARD VILLAS

ON the walls of the muniment-room of the old
Borromeo palace in Milan, Michelino, a little-
known painter of the fifteenth century, has
depicted the sports and diversions of that noble family.
Here may be seen ladies in peaked hennins and long
drooping sleeves, with their shock-headed gallants in
fur-edged tunics and pointed shoes, engaged in curious
games and dances, against the background of Lake
Maggiore and the Borromean Islands.

It takes the modern traveller an effort of mental read-
justment to recognize in this " clump of peaked isles " —
bare Leonardesque rocks thrusting themselves splinter-
wise above the lake — the smiling groves and terraces
of the Isola Bella and the Isola Madre. For in those
days the Borromei had not converted their rocky islands
into the hanging gardenswhich to later travellers became
one of the most important sights of the "grand tour";
and one may learn from this curious fresco with what
seemingly hopeless problems the Italian garden-art dealt,
and how, while audaciously remodelling nature, it con-
trived to keep in harmony with the surroundings amid
which it worked.

197

ITALIAN VILLAS

The Isola Madre, the largest of the Borromean group,
was the first to be built on and planted. The plain
Renaissance palace still looks down on a series of walled
gardens and a grove of cypress, laurel and pine ; but
the greater part of the island has been turned into an
■: English park of no special interest save to the horticul-
turist, who may study here the immense variety of exotic
plants which flourish in the mild climate of the lakes.
The Isola Bella, that pyramid of flower-laden terraces
rising opposite Stresa, in a lovely bend of the lake,
began to take its present shape about 1632, when Count
Carlo III built a casino di delizie on the rocky pinnacle.
His son. Count Vitaliano IV, continued and completed
the work. He levelled the pointed rocks, filled their
interstices with countless loads of soil from the mainland,
and summoned Carlo Fontana and a group of Milanese
architects to raise the palace and garden-pavilions above
terraces created by Castelli and Crivelli, while the water-
works were entrusted to Mora of Rome, the statuary
and other ornamental sculpture to Vismara. The work
was completed in 1671, and the island, which had been
created a baronial fief, was renamed Isola Isabella, after
the count's mother — a name which euphony, and the
general admiration the place excited, soon combined to
contract to Isola Bella.

The island is built up in ten terraces, narrowing suc-
cessively toward the top, the lowest resting on great
vaulted arcades which project into the lake and are used

198

LOMBARD VILLAS

as a winter shelter for the lemon-trees of the upper gar-
dens. Each terrace is enclosed in a marble balustrade,
richly ornamented with vases, statues and obelisks, and
planted with a profusion of roses, camellias, jasmine,
myrtle and pomegranate, among which groups of
cypresses lift their dark shafts. Against the retaining-
walls oranges and lemons are espaliered, and flowers
border every path and wreathe every balustrade and
stairway. It seems probable, from the old descriptions
of the Isola Bella, that it was originally planted much as
it now appears ; in fact, the gardens of the Italian lakes
are probably the only old pleasure-grounds of Italy
where flowers have always been used in profusion. In
the equable lake climate, neither cold in winter, like the
Lombard plains, nor parched in summer, like the South,
the passion for horticulture seems to have developed
early, and the landscape-architect was accustomed to
mingle bright colours with his architectural masses, in-
stead of relying on a setting of uniform verdure.

The topmost terrace of the Isola Bella is crowned
by a mount, against which is built a water-theatre of
excessively baroque design. This architectural compo-
sition faces the southern front of the palace, a large and
not very interesting building standing to the north of
the gardens ; while the southern extremity of the island
terminates in a beautiful garden-pavilion, hexagonal in
shape, with rusticated coigns and a crowning balustrade
beset with statues. Even the narrow reef projecting

199

ITALIAN VILLAS

into the lake below this pavilion has been converted
into another series of terraces, with connecting flights
of steps, which carry down to the water's edge the
exuberant verdure of the upper gardens.

The palace is more remarkable for what it contains in
the way of furniture and decoration than for any archi-
tectural value. Its great bulk and heavy outline are
quite disproportionate to the airy elegance of the gar-
dens it overlooks, and house and grounds seem in
this case to have been designed without any regard to
each other. The palace has, however, one feature of
peculiar interest to the student of villa-architecture,
namely, the beautiful series of rooms in the south base-
ment, opening on the gardens, and decorated with the
most exquisite ornamentation of pebble-work and sea-
shells, mingled with delicately tinted stucco. These
low vaulted rooms, with marble floors, grotto-like walls,
and fountains dripping into fluted conchs, are like a
poet's notion of some twilight refuge from summer
heats, where the languid green air has the coolness of
water; even the fantastic consoles, tables and benches,
in which cool-glimmering mosaics are combined with
carved wood and stucco painted in faint greens and
rose-tints, might have been made of mother-of-pearl,
coral and seaweed for the adornment of some submarine
palace. As examples of the decoration of a garden-
house in a hot climate, these rooms are unmatched in
Italy, and their treatment offers appropriate suggestions

200

LOMBARD VILLAS

to the modern garden-architect in search of effects of
coolness.

To show how httle the gardens of the Isola Bella
have been changed since they were first laid out, it is
worth while to quote the description of Bishop Burnet,
that delightful artist in orthography and punctuation,
who descended into Italy in the year 1685, with his
" portmangles " laden upon "mullets."

" From Lngane^' the bishop's breathless periods
begin, " I went to the Lago Maggiore, which is a great
and noble Lake, it is six and fifty Miles long, and in
most places six Miles broad, and a hundred Fathoms
deep about the middle of it, it makes a great Bay to the
Westward, and there lies here two Islands called the Bor-
romean Islands, that are certainly the loveliest spots of
ground in the World, there is nothing in all Italy that
can be compared to them, they have the full view of the
Lake, and the ground rises so sweetly in them that
nothing can be imagined like the Terraces here, they
belong to two Counts of the Borromean family. I was
only in one of them, which belongs to the head of the
Family, who is Nephew to the famous Cardinal known
by the name of St Carlo . . . The whole Island is a
garden . . . and because the figure of the Island was
not made regular by Nature, they have built great
Vaults and Portica's along the Rock, which are all
made Grotesque, and so they have brought it into a
regular form by laying earth over those Vaults. There

201

ITALIAN VILLAS

is first a Garden to the East that rises up from the Lake
by five rows of Terrasses, on the three sides of the Gar-
den that are watered by the Lake, the Stairs are noble,
the Walls are all covered with Oranges and Citrons, and a
more beautiful spot of a Garden cannot be seen: There
are two buildings in the two corners of this Garden, the
one is only a Mill for fetching up the Water, and the
other is a noble Summer-House [the hexagonal pavil-
ion] all Wainscotted, if I may speak so, with Alabaster
and Marble of a fine colour inclining to red, from this
Garden one goes in a level to all the rest of the Alleys
and Parterres, Herb-Gardens and Flower-Gardens, in
all which there are Varieties of Fountains and Ar-
bors, but the great Parterre is a surprizing thing, for as
it is well furnished with Statues and Fountains, and is
of a vast extent, and justly scituated to the Palace, so at
the further-end of it there is a great Mount, that face of
it that looks to the Parterre is made like a Theatre all
full of Fountains and Statues, the height rising up in five
several rows . . . and round this Mount, answering to
the five rows into which the Theatre is divided, there goes
as Many Terrasses of noble Walks, the Walls are all as
close covered with Oranges and Citrons as any of our
Walls in England dcct with Laurel: the top of the Mount
is seventy foot long and forty broad, and here is a vast
Cestern into which the Mill plays up the water that must
furnish all the Fountains . . . The freshness of the Air,
it being both in a Lake and near the Mountains, the

202

VILLA ISOLA BELLA, LAKE MAGGIORE

LOMBARD VILLAS

fragrant smell, the beautiful Prospect, and the delighting
Variety that is here makes it such a habitation for Sum-
mer that perhaps the whole World hath nothing like it."
Seventeenth-century travellers were unanimous in
extolling the Isola Bella, though, as might have been
expected, their praise was chiefly for those elaborations
and ingenuities of planning and engineering which give
least pleasure in the present day. Toward the middle
of the eighteenth century a critical reaction set in.
Tourists, enamoured of the new " English garden," and
of Rousseau's descriptions of the "bosquet de Julie,"
could see nothing to admire in the ordered architecture
of the Borromean Islands. The sentimental sight-seer,
sighing for sham Gothic ruins, for glades planted "after
Poussin," and for all the laboured naturalism of Repton
and Capability Brown, shuddered at the frank artifice
of the old Italian garden-architecture. The quarrel
then begun still goes on, and sympathies are divided
between the artificial-natural and the frankly conven-
tional. The time has come, however, when it is recog-
nized that both these manners aye manners, the one as
artificial as the other, and each to be judged, not by any
ethical standard of "sincerity," but on its own aesthetic
merits. This has enabled modern critics to take a fairer
view of such avowedly conventional compositions as the
Isola Bella, a garden in comparison with which the
grounds of the great Roman villas are as naturaHstic as
the age of Rousseau could have desired.

205

ITALIAN VILLAS

Thus impartially judged, the Isola Bella still seems
to many too complete a negation of nature ; nor can it
appear otherwise to those who judge of it only from
pictures and photographs, who have not seen it in its
environment. For the landscape surrounding the Bor-
romean Islands has precisely that quality of artificiality,
of exquisitely skilful arrangement and manipulation,
which seems to justify, in the garden-architect, almost
any excesses of the fancy. The Roman landscape,
grandiose and ample, seems an unaltered part of nature;
so do the subtly modelled hills and valleys of central
Italy: all these scenes have the deficiencies, the repeti-
tions, the meannesses and profusions, with which nature
throws her great masses on the canvas of the world;
but the lake scenery appears to have been designed by
a lingering and fastidious hand, bent on eliminating
every crudeness and harshness, and on blending all
natural forms, from the bare mountain-peak to the
melting curve of the shore, in one harmony of ever-
varying and ever-beautiful lines.

The effect produced is undoubtedly one of artificiality,
of a chosen exclusion of certain natural qualities, such
as gloom, barrenness, and the frank ugliness into which
nature sometimes lapses. There is an almost forced
gaiety about the landscape of the lakes, a fixed smile of
perennial loveliness. And it is as a complement to this
attitude that the Borromean gardens justify themselves.
Are they real? No ; but neither is the landscape about

206

LOMBARD VILLAS

them. Are they Hke any other gardens on earth? No;
but neither are the mountains and shores about them
Hke earthly shores and mountains. They are Armida's
gardens anchored in a lake of dreams, and they should
be compared, not with this or that actual piece of planted
ground, but with a page of Ariosto or Boiardo.

From the garden-student's point of view, there is
nothing in Lombardy as important as the Isola Bella.
In these rich Northern provinces, as in the environs of
Florence, the old gardens have suffered from the afflu-
ence of their owners, and scarcely any have been
allowed to retain their original outline. The enthusiasm
for the English garden swept over Lombardy like a
tidal wave, obliterating terraces and grottoes, substitut-
ing winding paths for pleached alleys, and transforming
level box-parterres into rolling lawns which turn as
brown as door-mats under the scorching Lombard
sun.

On the lakes, where the garden-architect was often
restricted to a narrow ledge of ground between moun-
tains and water, these transformations were less easy,
for the new style required a considerable expanse of
ground for its development. Along the shores of Como
especially, where the ground rises so abruptly from the
lake, landscape effects were difficult to produce, nor was
it easy to discover a naturalistic substitute for the marble
terraces built above the water. Even here, however,
the narrow gardens have been as much modified as

207

ITALIAN VILLAS

space permitted, the straight paths have been made to
wind, and spotty flower-beds in grass have replaced
the ordered box- gardens with their gravelled walks and
their lemon-trees in earthen vases.

The only old garden on Como which keeps more
than a fragment of its original architecture is that of the
Villa d'Este at Cernobbio, a mile 6r two from the town
of Como, at the southern end of the lake. The villa,
built in 1527 by Cardinal Gallio (who was born a fisher-
lad of Cernobbio), has passed through numerous trans-
formations. In 1816 it was bought by Caroline of
Brunswick, who gave it the name of Este, and turned
it into a great structure of the Empire style. Here for
several years the Princess of Wales held the fantastic
court of which Bergami.the courier, was High Chamber-
lain if not Prince Consort; and, whatever disadvantages
may have accrued to herself from this establishment,
her residence at the Villa d'Este was a benefit to the
village, for she built the road connecting Cernobbio with
Moltrasio, which was the first carriage-drive along the
lake, and spent large sums on improvements in the
neighbourhood of her estate.

Since then the villa has suffered a farther change into
a large and fashionable hotel; but though Queen Caro-
line anglicized a part of the grounds, the main lines of
the old Renaissance garden still exist.

Behind the Villa d'Este the mountains are suffi-
ciently withdrawn to leave a gentle acclivity, which was

208

IN THE GARDENS OF ISOLA BELLA, LAKE MAGGIORE

LOMBARD VILLAS

once laid out in a series of elaborate gardens. Adjoin-
ing the villa is a piece of level ground just above the
lake, which evidently formed the " secret garden " with
its parterres and fountains. This has been replaced by a
lawn and flower-beds, but still keeps its boundary-wall
at the back, with a baroque grotto and fountain of pebbles
and shell-work. Above this rises a tapis vert shaded
by cypresses, and leading to the usual Hercules in a
temple. The peculiar feature of this ascent is that it is
bordered on each side with narrow steps of channelled
stone, down which the water rushes under overlapping
ferns and roses to the fish-pool below the grotto in the
lower garden. Beyond the formal gardens is the bosco,
a bit of fine natural woodland climbing the cliff-side,
with winding paths which lead to various summer-
houses and sylvan temples. The rich leafage of walnut,
acacia and cypress, the glimpses of the blue lake far
below, the rush of a mountain torrent through a deep
glen spanned by a romantic ivy-clad bridge, make this
bosco of the Villa d'Este one of the most enchanting
bits of sylvan gardening in Italy. Scarcely less en-
chanting is the grove of old plane-trees by the water-
gate on the lake, where, in a solemn twilight of over-
roofing branches, woodland gods keep watch above the
broad marble steps descending to the water. In the
gardens of the Villa d'Este there is much of the Roman
spirit — the breadth of design, the unforced inclusion of
natural features, and that sensitiveness to the quality

21 I

ITALIAN VILLAS

of the surrounding landscape which characterizes the
great gardens of the Campagna.

Just across the lake, in the deep shade of the wooded
cliffs beneath the Pizzo di Torno, lies another villa still
more steeped in the Italian garden-magic. This is the
Villa Pliniana, built in 1570 by the Count Anguissola of
Piacenza, and now the property of the Trotti family of
Milan. The place takes its name from an intermittent
spring in the court, which is supposed to be the one
described by Pliny in one of his letters ; and it is farther
celebrated as being the coolest villa on Como. It lies
on a small bay on the east side of the lake, and faces
due north, so that, while the villas of Cernobbio are
bathed in sunlight, a deep green shade envelops it.
The house stands on a narrow ledge, its foundations
projecting into the lake, and its back built against the
almost vertical wooded cliff which protects it from the
southern sun. Down this cliff pours a foaming moun-
tain torrent from the Val di Galore, just beneath the
peak of Torno; and this torrent the architect of the Villa
Pliniana has captured in its descent to the lake and car-
ried through the central apartment of the villa.

The effect produced is unlike anything else, even in
the wonderland of Italian gardens. The t\\'o wings of
the house, a plain and somewhat melancholy-looking
structure, are joined by an open arcaded room, against
the back wall of which the torrent pours down, over
stonework tremulous with moss and ferns, gushing

212

LOMBARD VILLAS

out again beneath the balustrade of the loggia, where
it makes a great semicircle of glittering whiteness in
the dark-green waters of the lake. The old house is
saturated with the freshness and drenched with the
flying spray of the caged torrent. The bare vaulted
rooms reverberate with it, the stone floors are green
with its dampness, the air quivers with its cool incessant
rush. The contrast of this dusky dripping loggia, on
its perpetually shaded bay, with the blazing blue waters
of the lake and their sun-steeped western shores, is one
of the most wonderful effects in sensation that the Italian
villa-art has ever devised.

The architect, not satisfied with diverting a part of
the torrent to cool his house, has led the rest in a fall
down the cliff immediately adjoining the villa, and has
designed winding paths through the woods from which
one may look down on the bright rush of the waters.
On the other side of the house lies a long balustraded
terrace, between the lake and the hanging woods, and
here, on the only bit of open and level ground near the
house, are the old formal gardens, now much neglected,
but still full of a melancholy charm.

After the Villa Pliniana, the other gardens of Como
seem almost commonplace. All along both shores are
villas which, amid many alterations, have preserved
traces of their old garden-architecture, such as the
Bishop of Como's villa, south of Leno, with its baroque
saints and prophets perched along the garden-balus-

ITALIAN VILLAS

trade, and the more famous Villa Carlotta at Cade-
nabbia, where the fine gateways and the architectural
treatment of the terraces bear witness to the former
beauty of the grounds. But almost everywhere the
old garden-magic has been driven out by a fury of
modern horticulture. The pleached alleys have made
way for lawns dotted with palms and bananas, the box-
parterres have been- replaced by star-shaped beds of
begonias and cinerarias, and the groves of laurel and
myrtle by thickets of pampas-grass and bamboo. This
description applies to all the principal gardens between
Como and Bellagio. Here and there, indeed, in almost
all of them, some undisturbed corner remains — a flight
of steps wreathed in Banksian roses and descending to
a shady water-gate ; a fern-lined grotto with a stucco
Pan or Syrinx ; a clipped laurel-walk set with marble
benches, or a classic summer-house above the lake —
but these old bits are so scattered and submerged under
the new order of gardening that it requires an effort of
the imagination to reconstruct from them an image of
what the old lake-gardens must have been before every
rich proprietor tried to convert his marble terraces into
an English park.

Almost to be included among lake-villas is the beau-
tiful Villa Cicogna at Bisuschio. This charming old
place lies in the lovely but little-known hill-country be-
tween the Lake of Varese and the southern end of
Lugano. The house, of which the history appears to

214

VJLLA CICOGNA, FROM THE TERRACE ABOV^E THE HOUSE

LOMBARD VILLAS

be unknown to the present owners, is an early Renais-
sance building of great beauty, with a touch of Tuscan
austerity in its design. The plain front, with deep pro-
jecting eaves and widely spaced windows, might stand
on some village square above the Arno ; and the interior
court, with its two-storied arcade, recalls, in purity and
lightness of design, the inheritors of Brunelleschi's tradi-
tion. So few country houses of the early sixteenth cen-
tury are to be found in the Milanese that it would be
instructive to learn whether the Villa Cicogna is in fact
due to a Tuscan hand, or whether this mid-Italian style
was at that time also prevalent in Lombardy.

The villa is built against a hillside, and the interior
court forms an oblong, enclosed on three sides by the
house, and continued on the fourth by a beautiful
sunken garden, above which runs a balustraded walk
on a level with the upper story. On the other side of
the house is another garden, consisting of a long terrace
bounded by a high retaining-wall, which is tunnelled
down its whole length to form a shady arcaded walk
lined with ferns and dripping with runnels of water. At
the back of the house the ground continues to rise, and
a chateau d'eaii is built against the hillside; while be-
yond the terrace-garden already described, a gate leads
to a hanging woodland, with shady walks from which,
at every turn, there are enchanting views across the
southern bay of Lake Lugano.

The house itself is as interesting as the garden. The

2 I 7

ITALIAN VILLAS

walls of the court are frescoed in charming cinque-cento
designs, and the vaulted ceiling of the loggia is painted
in delicate trellis-work, somewhat in the manner of the
semicircular arcade at the Villa di Papa Giulio. Sev-
eral of the rooms also preserve their wall-frescoes and
much of their Renaissance furniture, while a series of
smaller apartments on the ground floor are exquisitely-
decorated with stucco ornament in the light style of the
eighteenth century; so that the Villa Cicogna still gives
a vivid idea of what an old Italian country house must.,
have been in its original state.

From the hill-villas of the lakes to the country places
of the Milanese rice-fields the descent is somewhat ab-
rupt; but the student of garden-architecture may mitigate
the transition by carrying on his researches from the
southern end of Como through the smiling landscape of
the Brianza. Here there are many old villas, in a lovely
setting of vineyard and woodland, with distant views of
the Alps and of the sunny Lombard plain; but of old
gardens few are to be found. There is one of great beauty,
belonging to the Villa Crivelli, near the village of Inve-
rigo ; but as it is inaccessible to visitors, only tantalizing
glimpses may be obtained of its statues and terraces, its
cypress-walks and towering " Gigante." Not far from
Inverigo is the Rotonda Cagnola, now the property of
the Marchese d'Adda, and built in 1 8 13 by the Marchese
Luigi Cagnola in imitation of the Propylsea of the
Acropolis. The house is beautifully placed on a hilltop,

218

LOMBARD VILLAS

with glorious views over the Alps and Apennines, and is
curious to the student as an example of the neo-classi-
cism of the Empire ; but it has of course no gardens in
the old sense of the term.

The flat environs of Milan were once dotted with
country houses, but with the growth of the city and the
increased facilities of travel, these have been for the most
part abandoned for villas in the hills or on the lakes,
and to form an idea of their former splendour one must
turn to the pages of Alberto del Re's rare volumes.
Here one may see in all its detail that elaborate style of
gardening which the French landscape-gardeners devel-
oped from the "grand manner" acquired by Le Notre
in his study of the great Roman country-seats. This
style, adapted to the flat French landscape, and com-
plicated by the mannerisms and elaborations of the
eighteenth century, came back to Italy with the French
fashions which Piedmont and Lombardy were so fond
of importing. The time had passed when Europe mod-
elled itself on Italy: France was now the glass of fashion,
and, in northern Italy especially, French architecture and
gardening were eagerly reproduced.

In Lombardy the natural conditions were so similar
that the French geometrical gardens did not seem out
of place ; yet even here a difference is felt, both in the
architecture and the gardens. Italy, in spite of Palladio
and the Palladian tradition, never freed herself from the
baroque. Her artistic tendencies were all toward free-

219

ITALIAN VILLAS

dom, improvisation, individual expression, while France
was fundamentally classical and instinctively temperate.
Just as the French cabinet-makers and bronze-chisellers
and modellers in stucco produced more delicate and fin-
ished, but less personal, work than the Italian craftsmen,
so the French architects designed with greater precision
and restraint, and less play of personal invention. To
establish a rough distinction, it might be said that French
art has always been intellectual and Italian art emotional;
and this distinction is felt even in the treatment of the
pleasure-house and its garden. In Italy the architectural
detail remained baroque till the end of the eighteenth
century, and the architect permitted himself far greater
license in the choice of forms and the combination of
materials. The old villas of the Milanese have a very
strong individuality, and it is to be regretted that so few
remain intact to show what a personal style they pre-
served even under the most obvious French influences.
The Naviglio, the canal which flows through Milan
and sends various branches to the Ticino and the Adda,
was formerly lined for miles beyond the city with sub-
urban villas. Few remain unaltered, and even of these
few the old gardens have disappeared. One of the most
interesting houses in Del Re's collection, the Villa Alario
(now Visconti di Saliceto), on theNavigho near Cernusco,
is still in perfect preservation without and within ; and
though its old gardens were replaced by an English park
early in the nineteenth century, their general outline is

220

VILLA PLINIANA, LAKE COMO

LOMBARD VILLAS

still discoverable. The villa, a stately pile built by
Ruggieri in 1736, looks on a court divided from the
highway by a fine wall and beautiful iron gates. Low
wings containing the chapel and offices, and running at
right angles to the main building, connect the latter with
the courtyard walls ; and arched passages through the
centre of the wings lead to outlying courts surrounded
by stables and other dependencies. The house, toward
the forecourt, has a central open loggia or atrium, and
the upper windows are framed in baroque architraves
and surmounted by square attic lights. The garden ele-
vation is more elaborate. Here there is a central pro-
jection, three windows wide, flanked by two-storied
open loggias, and crowned by an attic with ornamental
pilasters and urns. This central bay is adorned with
beautiful wrought-iron balconies, which are repeated
in the wings at each end of the building. All the
wrought-iron of the Villa Visconti is remarkable for
its elegance and originality, and as used on the ter-
races, and in the balustrade of the state staircase, in
combination with heavy baroque stone balusters, it is an
interesting example of a peculiarly Lombard style of
decoration.

Between the house and the Naviglio there once lay
an elaborate parterre de broderie, terminated above the
canal by a balustraded retaining-wall adorned with stat-
ues, and flanked on each side by pleached walks, arbours,
trellis-work and fish-ponds. Of this complicated plea-

223

IRON GATES OF THE VILLA ALAKIO
(now visconti di saliceto)

ITALIAN VILLAS

sance little remains save the long terraces extending from
each end of the house, the old flower-garden below one
of these, and some bits of decorative sculpture incorpo-
rated in the boundary-
walls. The long tank or
canal shown in Del Re's
print has been turned
into an irregular pond
^^ ^ ,^^. with grass-banks, and

1 lii|riUig^|i.-C the parterre de broderie

is now a lawn ; even the
balustrade has been re-
moved from the wall along the Naviglio. Still, the ar-
chitectural details of the forecourt and the terraces are
worthy of careful study, and the unusual beauty of the
old villa, with its undisturbed group of dependencies,
partly atones for the loss of its original surroundings.

Many eighteenth-century country houses in the style
of the Villa Visconti are scattered through the Milanese,
though few have retained so unaltered an outline, or
even such faint traces of their formal gardens. The
huee villa of the Duke of Modena at Varese — now the
Municipio — is a good example of the same architecture,
and has a beautiful stone-and-iron balustrade and many
wrought-iron balconies in the same style as those at
Cernusco ; and its gardens, ascending the hillside behind
the house, and now used as a public park, must once
have been very fine. The Grand Hotel of Varese is

224

LOMBARD VILLAS

also an old villa, and its architectural screen and pro-
jecting wings form an unusually characteristic fa9ade of
the same period. Here, again, little remains of the old
garden but a charming upper terrace ; but the interior
decorations of many of the rooms are undisturbed, and
are exceptionally interesting examples of the more deli-
cate Italian baroque.

Another famous country house, Castellazzod'Arconate,
at Bollate, is even more palatial than the Duke of Mo-
dena's villa at Varese, and, while rather heavy in general
outline, has an interesting interior facade, with a long
arcade resting on coupled columns, and looking out over
a stately courtyard with statues. This villa is said to
have preserved a part of its old gardens, but it is difficult
of access, and could not be visited at the time when the
material for these chapters was collected.

RAILING OF THE VILLA ALARIO

»9

225

VILLAS OF VENETIA

^-i^if&^^

GATEWAY OF THE BOTANIC GARDEN, PADUA

VII
VILLAS OF VENETIA

WRITERS on Italian architecture have hitherto
paid Httle attention to the villa-architecture
ofVenetia. It is only within the last few
years that English and American critics have deigned
to recognize any architectural school in Italy later than
that of Vignola and Palladio, and even these two great
masters of the sixteenth century have been held up as
examples of degeneracy to a generation bred in the
Ruskinian code of art ethics. In France, though the
influence of VioUet-le-Duc was nearly as hostile as
Ruskin's to any true understanding of Italian art, the
Latin instinct for form has asserted itself in a revived
study of the classic tradition; but French writers on
architecture have hitherto confined themselves chiefly to
the investigation of their national styles.

It is only in Germany that Italian architecture from
Palladio to Juvara has received careful and sympathetic
study. Burckhardt pointed the way in his "Cicerone"
and in " The Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy " ;
Herr Gustav Ebe followed with an interesting book on
the late Renaissance throughout Europe ; and Herr

20

231

ITALIAN VILLAS

Gurlitt has produced the most masterly work yet writ-
ten on the subject, his " History of the Baroque Style
in Italy." These authors, however, having to work in
a new and extensive field, have necessarily been obliged
to restrict themselves to its most important divisions.
Burckhardt's invaluable " Renaissance Architecture,"
though full of critical insight, is rather a collection of
memoranda than a history of the subject ; and even
Herr Gurlitt, though he goes into much greater detail,
cannot forsake the highroad for the by-paths, and has
consequently had to pass by many minor ramifications
of his subject. This is especially to be regretted in re-
gard to the villa-architecture of Venetia, the interest and
individuality of which he fully appreciates. He points
out that the later Venetian styles spring from two
sources, the schools of Palladio and of Sansovino. The
former, greatly as his work was extolled, never had the
full sympathy of the Venetians. His art was too pure
and severe for a race whose taste had been formed on
the fantastic mingling of Gothic and Byzantine and on
the glowing decorations of the greatest school of colour-
ists the world has known. It was from the warm and
picturesque art of Sansovino and Longhena that the
Italian baroque naturally developed ; and though the
authority of Palladio made itself felt in the official archi-
tecture of Venetia, its minor constructions, especially
the villas and small private houses, seldom show any
trace of his influence save in the grouping of their win-

2^2

VILLAS OF VENETIA

dows. So little is known of the Venetian villa-builders
that this word as to their general tendencies must replace
the exact information which still remains to be gathered.

Many delightful examples of the Venetian maisoii de
plaisaiice are still to be found in the neighbourhood of
Padua and Treviso, along the Brenta, and in the coun-
try between the Euganeans and the Monti Berici. Un-
fortunately, in not more than one or two instances have
the old gardens of these houses been preserved in their
characteristic form; and, by a singular perversity of fate,
it happens that the villas which have kept their gardens
are not typical of the Venetian style. One of them, the
castle of Cattajo, at Battaglia in the Euganean Hills,
stands in fact quite apart from any contemporary style.
This extraordinary edifice, built for the Obizzi of Venice
about 1550, is said to have been copied from the plans
of a castle in Tartary brought home by Marco Polo.
It shows, at any rate, a deliberate reversion, in mid-
cinque-cento, to a kind of Gothicism which had become
obsolete in northern Italy three hundred years earlier ;
and the mingling of this rude style with classic detail
and Renaissance sculpture has produced an effect pic-
turesque enough to justify so quaint a tradition.

Cattajo stands on the edge of the smiling Euganean
country, its great fortress-like bulk built up against a
wooded knoll with a little river at its base. Crossing
the river by a bridge flanked by huge piers surmounted
with statues, one reaches a portcullis in a massive gate-

ITALIAN VILLAS

house, also adorned with statues. The portculHs opens
on a long narrow court planted with a hedge of clipped
euonymus ; and at one end a splendid balustraded stair-
way d cordon leads up to a flagged terrace with yew-
trees growing between the flags. To the left of this
terrace is a huge artificial grotto, with a stucco Silenus
lolling on an elephant, and other life-size animals and
figures, a composition recalling the zoological wonders
of the grotto at Castello. This Italian reversion to the
grotesque, at a time when it was losing its fascination for
the Northern races, might form the subject of an inter-
esting study of race aesthetics. When the coarse and
sombre fancy of mediaeval Europe found expression in
grinning gargoyles and baleful or buffoonish images, Ital-
ian art held serenely to the beautiful, and wove the most
tragic themes into a labyrinth of lovely lines ; but in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the classical
graces had taken possession of northern Europe, the
chimerical animals, the gnomes and goblins, the gar-
goyles and broomstick-riders, fled south of the Alps, and
reappeared in the queer fauna of Italian grottoes and in
the leering dwarfs and satyrs of the garden-walk.

From the yew-tree terrace at Cattajo an arcaded
loggia gives access to the interior of the castle, which is
a bewilderment of low-storied passageways and long
flights of steps hewn in the rock against which the
castle is built. From a vaulted tunnel of stone one
passes abruptly into a suite of lofty apartments decorated

234

V[FW iT \ AL SAN ZIBIO, NEAR BATTAGLIA

VILLAS OF VENETIA

with seventeenth-century frescoes and opening on a
balustraded terrace guarded by marble divinities; or,
taking another turn, one finds one's self in a sham
Gothic chapel or in a mediaeval chemin de ronde on the
crenelated walls. This fantastic medley of styles, in
conjunction with the unusual site of the castle, has
produced several picturesque bits of garden, wedged
between the walls and the hillside, or on the terraces
overhanging the river ; but from the architectural point
of view, the most interesting thing about Cattajo is the
original treatment of the great stairway in the court.

Six or seven miles from Battaglia, in a narrow and
fertile valley of the Euganeans, lies one of the most
beautiful pleasure-grounds in Italy. This is the garden
of the villa at Val San Zibio. On approaching it, one
sees, across a grassy common, a stately and ornate
arch of triumph with a rusticated facade and a broken
pediment enriched with statues. This arch, which looks
as though it were the principal entrance-gate, appears
to have been placed in the high boundary-wall merely
in order to afford from the highway a vista of the
cJidteau d'emi which is the chief feature of the gardens.
The practice of breaking the wall to give a view of
some special point in the park or garden was very com-
mon in France, but is seldom seen in Italy, though
there is a fine instance of it in the open grille below the
Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati.

The house at Val San Zibio is built with its back to

237

ITALIAN VILLAS

the highroad, and is an unpretentious structure of the
seventeenth century, not unHke the Villa de' Gori at
Siena, though the Palladian grouping of its central win-
dows shows the nearness of Venice. It looks on a ter-
race enclosed by a balustrade, whence a broad flight of
steps descends to the gently sloping gardens. They
are remarkable for their long pleached alleys of beech,
their wide tapis verts, fountains, marble benches and
statues charmingly placed in niches of clipped verdure.
In one direction is a little lake, in another a "mount"
crowned by a statue, while a long alley leads to a well-
preserved maze with a raised platform in its centre.
These labyrinths are now rarely found in Italian gar-
dens, and were probably never as popular south of the
Alps as in Holland and England. The long cJidtcaii
d'eau, with its couchant Nereids and conch-blowing
Tritons, descends a gentle slope instead of a steep hill,
and on each side high beech-hedges enclose tall groves
of deciduous trees. These hedges are characteristic of
the north Italian gardens, where the plane, beech and
elm replace the "perennial greens" of the south; and
there is one specially charming point at Val San Zibio,
where four grass-alleys walled with clipped beeches
converge on a stone basin sunk in the turf, with four
marble putti seated on the curb, dangling their feet in
the water. An added touch of quaintness is given to
the gardens by the fact that the old water-works are
still in action, so that the unwary visitor, assailed by

238

VILLAS OF VENETIA

fierce jets of spray darting up at him from the terrace
steps, the cracks in the flagstones, and all manner of
unexpected ambushes, may form some idea of the
aquatic surprises which afforded his ancestors such
inexhaustible amusement.

There are few gardens in Italy comparable with
Val San Zibio ; but in Padua there is one of another
sort which has kept something of the same ancient
savor. This is the famous Botanic Garden, founded in
1545, and said to be the oldest in Italy. The accom-

THE BOTANIC GARDEN OF PADUA

ITALIAN VILLAS

panying plan, though roughly sketched from memory,
will give some idea of its arrangement. Outside is a
grove of exotic trees, which surrounds a large circular
space enclosed in a beautiful old brick wall surmounted
by a marble balustrade and adorned alternately with
busts and statues. The wall is broken by four gate-
ways, one forming the principal entrance from the
grove, the other three opening on semicircles in which
statues are set against a background of foliage. In the
garden itself the beds for " simples " are enclosed in low
iron railings, within which they are again subdivided by
stone edgings, each subdivision containing a different
species of plant.

Padua, in spite of its flat surroundings, is one of the
most picturesque cities of upper Italy ; and the seeker
after gardens will find many charming bits along the
narrow canals, or by the sluggish river skirting the city
walls. Indeed, one might almost include in a study of
gardens the beautiful Prato della Valle, the public
square before the church of Santa Giustina, with its en-
circling canal crossed by marble bridges, its range of
baroque statues of "worthies," and its central expanse
of turf and trees. There is no other example in Italy
of a square laid out in this park-like way, and the Prato
della Valle would form an admirable model for the treat-
ment of open spaces in a modern city.

A few miles from Padua, at Ponte di Brenta, begins
the long line of villas which follows the course of the

240

VAL SAN ZIBIO, NEAR BATTAGLIA

•A

-.1 ■

."••'i'i!->'V .

VAL SAN ZIBIO

VILLAS OF VENETIA

river to its outlet at Fusina. Dante speaks in the " In-
ferno " of the villas and castles on the Brenta, and it
continued the favourite villeggiatura of the Venetian
nobility till the middle of the nineteenth century. There
dwelt the Signor Pococurante, whom Candide visited on
his travels ; and of flesh-and-blood celebrities many
might be cited, from the famous Procuratore Pisani to
Byron, who in 1819 carried off the Guiccioli to his
villa at La Mira on the Brenta.

The houses still remain almost line for line as they
were drawn in Gianfrancesco Costa's admirable etch-
ings, "Le Delizie del Fiume Brenta," published in 1750;
but unfortunately almost all the old gardens have dis-
appeared. One, however, has been preserved, and as
it is the one most often celebrated by travellers and
poets of the eighteenth century, it may be regarded as
a good example of a stately Venetian garden. This is
the great villa built at Stra, in 1736, for Alvise Pisani,
procurator of St. Mark's, by the architects Prati and
Frigimelica. In size and elegance it far surpasses any
other house on the Brenta. The prevailing note of the
other villas is one of simplicity and amenity. They
stand near each other, either on the roadside or divided
from it by a low wall bordered with statues and a
short strip of garden, also thickly peopled with nymphs,
satyrs, shepherdesses, and the grotesque and comic
figures of the Commedia dell' Arte ; unassuming "vil-
lini for the most part, suggesting a life of suburban

ITALIAN VILLAS

neighbourliness and sociability. But the Villa Pisani is
a palace. Its majestic facade, with pillared central corps
de bdtiment and far-reaching wings, stands on the high-
way bordering the Brenta ; behind are the remains of
the old formal gardens, and on each side, the park
extends along the road, from which it is divided by a

high wall and several im-
posing gateways. The
palace is built about two
inner courts, and its in-
numerable rooms are fres-
coed by the principal
Italian decorative painters
of the day, while the great
central saloon has one
of Tiepolo's most riotously splendid ceilings. Fortu-
nately for the preservation of these treasures, Stra, after
being the property of Eugene Beauharnais, was ac-
quired by the Italian government, and is now a " villa
nazionale," well kept up and open to the public.

In the etching of Costa, an elaborate formal garden
with parterres de broderie is seen to extend from the
back of the villa to the beautifully composed stables
which face it. This garden has unfortunately been re-
placed by a level meadow, flanked on both sides by
boschi, with long straight walks piercing the dense green
leafage of elm, beech and lime. Here and there frag-
ments of garden-architecture have survived the evident

GATEWAY— VILLA PISANI, STRA

244

VILLAS OF VKNETIA

attempt to convert the grounds into 2i jardin anglais of
the sentimental type. There is still a maze, with a fan-
ciful little central tower ascended by winding stairs ;
there is a little wooded " mount," with a moat about it,
and a crowning temple ; and there are various charm-
ing garden-pavilions, orangeries, gardeners' houses, and
similar small constructions, all built in the airy and ro-
mantic style of which the Italian villa-architect had not
yet lost the secret. Architecturally, however, the stables
are perhaps the most interesting buildings at Stra. Their
classical central fagade is flanked by two curving wings,
forming charmingly proportioned lemon-houses, and in
the stables themselves the stalls are sumptuously di-
vided by columns of red marble, each surmounted by
the gilded effigy of a horse.

From Stra to Fusina the shores of the Brenta are
lined with charming pleasure-houses, varying in size
from the dignified villa to the little garden-pavilion, and
all full of interest and instruction to the student of villa-
architecture ; but unhappily no traces of their old gar-
dens remain, save the statues which once peopled the
parterres and surmounted the walls. Several of the
villas are attributed to Palladio, but only one is really
typical of his style : the melancholy Malcontenta, built
by the Foscari, and now standing ruinous and deserted
in a marshy field, beside the river.

The Malcontenta has all the chief characteristics of
Palladio's manner: the high basement, the projecting

ITALIAN VILLAS

pillared portico, the general air of classical correctness,
which seems a little cold beside the bright and graceful
villa-architecture of Venetia. Burckhardt, with his usual
discernment, remarks in this connection that it was a
fault of Palladio's to substitute for the recessed loggia
of the Roman villa a projecting portico, thus sacrificing
one of the most characteristic and original features of
the Italian country house to a not particularly appro-
priate adaptation of the Greek temple porch.

But Palladio was a great artist, and if he was great
in his civic architecture rather than in his country
houses, if his stately genius lent itself rather to the
grouping of large masses than to the construction of
pretty toys, yet his most famous villa is a distinct and
original contribution to the chief examples of the Italian
pleasure-house. The Villa Capra, better known as the
Rotonda, which stands on a hill above Vicenza, has
been criticized for having four fronts instead of one front,
two sides and a back. It is, in fact, a square building
with a projecting Ionic portico on each face — a plan
open to the charge of monotony, but partly justified in
this case by the fact that the house is built on the sum-
mit of a knoll from which there are four views, all
equally pleasing, and each as it were entitled to the
distinction of having a loggia to itself Still, it is cer-
tain that neither in the Rotonda nor in his other villas
did Palladio hit on a style half as appropriate or pleas-
ing as the typical manner of the Roman villa-architects,

246

VILLA VALMARANA, VICENZA

VALMARANA

lifiJ

VILLAS OF VENETIA

with its happy mingling of freedom and classicaHsm, its
wonderful adaptation to climate and habits of life, its
capricious grace of detail, and its harmony with the
garden-architecture which was designed to surround it.

The Villa Capra has not preserved its old gardens,
and at the Villa Giacomelli, at Maser, Palladio's other
famous country house, the grounds have been so mod-
ernized and stripped of all their characteristic features
that it is difficult to judge of their original design ; but
one feels that all Palladio's rural architecture lacked
that touch of fancy and freedom which, in the Roman
school, facilitated the transition of manner from the
house to the garden-pavilion, and from the pavilion to
the half-rustic grotto and the woodland temple.

The Villa Valmarana, also at Vicenza, on the Monte
Berico, not far from the Rotonda, has something of the
intimate charm lacking in the latter. The low and
simply designed house is notable only for the charming
frescoes with which Tiepolo adorned its rooms ; but the
beautiful loggia in the garden is attributed to Palladio,
and this, together with the old beech-alleys, the charm-
ing frescoed fountain, the garden-wall crowned by
Venetian grotesques, forms a composition of excep-
tional picturesqueness.

The beautiful country-side between Vicenza and Ve-
rona is strewn with old villas, many of which would
doubtless repay study ; but there are no gardens of
note in this part of Veneto, except the famous Giusti

249

ITALIAN VILLAS

gardens at Verona, probably better known to sight-
seers than any others in northern Italy. In spite of all
their charm, however, the dusky massing of their old
cypresses, and their winding walks along the cliff-side,
the Giusti gardens preserve few traces of their original
design, and are therefore not especially important to
the student of Italian garden-architecture. More inter-
esting in this connection is the Villa Cuzzano, about seven
miles from Verona, a beautiful old house standing above
a terrace-garden planted with an elaborate parterre de
broderie. Behind the villa is a spacious court bounded
by a line of low buildings with a central chapel. The
interior of the house has been little changed, and is an
interesting example of north Italian villa planning and
decoration. The passion of the Italian architects for
composition and continuity of design is seen in the
careful placing of the chapel, which is exactly on an
axis with the central saloon of the villa, so that, stand-
ing in the chapel, one looks across the court, through
this lofty saloon, and out on the beautiful hilly landscape
beyond. It was by such means that the villa-architects
obtained, with simple materials and in a limited space,
impressions of distance, and sensations of the unex-
pected, for which one looks in vain in the haphazard
and slipshod designs of the present day.

2;o

LIST OF BOOKS MENTIONED

Gianfrancesco Costa
Giovanni Falda
Peter Paul Rubens
Rafaello Soprani

Giuseppe Zocchi

ITALIAN

Le Dclizie del Fiume Breiita. 1750.

Giardini di Roma. N. d.

Palazzi di Genova. 1622.

Vite de' Pit tori, Sen I tori ed Architetti Geno-

vesi. (Second edition, revised, enlarged

and supplied with notes by C. G. Ratti.

1768.)
Vediite delle Villc e d'altri luoghi della Tos-

cana. 1 744.

Le President de Brosses

L. Dussieux

Michel de Montaigne

Percier et Fontaine

Marc Antonio del Re

Georges Riat
Eugene Emmanuel

Viollet-le-Duc

FRENCH

Lettres Familieres ecrites d' Italic en 1739

et I 740.
Artistes Franfais a I'Etranger.
Journal dn Voyage en Italie par la Suisse et

I 'A llemagne en 1580^/ 1 5 8 1 .
Choix des plus celcbres Maisons de Plai-

sance de Rome et de ses Environs. 1809.
Maisons de Plaisance de I'Etat de Milan.

Milan, 1743.
LArt des Jardins. N. d.
Dictiotmaire Raisonne de I' Architecture

Fran false. 1858.

251

LIST OF BOOKS MENTIONED

Jacob Burckhardt

H it

Josef Durm

Gustav Ebe
Cornelius Gurlitt
W. C. Tuckermann

GERMAN

Der Cicerone. 1 901.

Gcschichte der Renaissance in Italien. 1 89 1 .

Die Baustile : Die Baukiinst der Renais-
sance in Italien. 1903.

Die Spdtrenaissance. 1886.

Geschichte des Barockstils in Italien. 1887.

Die Gartenkunst der Italienischen Renais-
sance-Zeit. 1884.

Michael Bryan

G. Burnet, D.D.,
Bishop of Salisbury.

John Evelyn

ENGLISH

Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, bio-
graphical and critical. Revised and en-
larged by Robert Edmund Graves, B.A.,
1 886.

Some Letters, containing an Account of
what seemed most remarkable in Switzer-
land, Italy, etc. 1686.

Diary, 1644,

252

ARCHITECTS AND LANDSCAPE-
GARDENERS MENTIONED

ALESSI (GALEAZZO)

1512-1572

Though Alessi was a native of Perugia his best-known buildings
were erected in Genoa. Among them are the Villa Pallavicini alle
Peschiere, the Villa Imperiali (now Scassi), the Villa Giustiniani (now
Cambiaso), the Palazzo Parodi, the public granaries, and the church
of the Madonna di Carignano. He also laid out the Strada Nuova
in Genoa. His chief works in other places are : the Palazzo Marin
(now the Municipio) in Milan; the Palazzo Antinori, and the front of
the church of S. Maria del Popolo at Perugia ; and the church of the
Madonna degii Angeli near Assisi.

ALGARDI (ALESSANDRO)
1602-1654

Algardi, a Bolognese architect, was also distinguished as an engraver
and sculptor, and was noted for his figures of children. He built the
Villa Belrespiro or Pamphily on the Janiculan, and the Villa Sauli,
both in Rome.

AMMANATI (BARTOLOMMEO)

1511-1592

Ammanati, the pupil of Bandinelli and Sansovino, was one of the
most distinguished Florentine architects of the sixteenth century, and
was also noted for his garden-sculpture. In Florence some of his

ARCHITECTS AND LANDSCAPE-

best work is seen in the Boboli garden and in the court of the Pa-
lazzo Pitti, while the bridge of the S. Trinita is considered his master-
piece. In Rome he built the fine facades of the Palazzo Ruspoli
and of the Collegio Romano. The rusticated loggia of the Villa Fonte
air Erta is ascribed to him.

BERNINI (GIOVANNI LORENZO)

1 598- 1 680

Bernini, a Neapolitan by birth, was the greatest Italian architect and
sculptor of the seventeeth century. One of his masterpieces in archi-
tecture is the church of S. Andrea al Noviziato on the Ouirinal, and
among his other works in Rome are : the piazza and colonnade of St.
Peter's, the Scala Regia in the Vatican, the Palazzo di Monte Citorio,
and the fountains of Trevi and the Tritone ; at Pistoja the Villa Ros-
pigliosi, at Terni the cathedral, and at Ravenna the Porta Nuova.

BORROMINI (FRANCESCO)
1 599-1667

Borromini, a pupil of Maderna, was, next to Bernini, the most original
and brilliant exponent of baroque architecture in Italy. He was born
in Lombardy, but worked principally in Rome. Among his best-
known buildings are the church of St. Agnes on the Piazza Navona,
that of San Carlo alle quattro fontane, and the College of the Propa-
ganda Fide. In conjunction with Bernini and Maderna, he built the
Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Some of his best work is seen in the
Villa Falconieri at Frascati.

BRAMANTE (DONATO)

1444-15 14

Bramante was born at Urbino, but executed all his early work in
Milan, producing the church of S. Maria delle Grazie, the Ospedale
Maggiore, and the sacristy of San Satiro, which he not only built, but
decorated internally. In Lombardy the early Renaissance of building
is called the Bramantesque style. Bramante's works in Rome are : the
Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, the palace of the Cancelleria, a
part of the Vatican, and a part of the Palazzo di San Biagio.

GARDENERS MENTJONED

BROWN (LANCELOT)

1715-1783 ■
Lancelot Brown, known as " Capability Brown," a native of North-
umberland, began his career in a kitchen-garden, but, though without
artistic training and unable to draw, he became for a time a popular
designer of landscape-gardens. He was appointed Royal Gardener at
Hampton Court, and laid out the lake at Blenheim. He was consid-
ered to excel in water-gardens.

BUONTALENTI (BERNARDO TIMANTE)
1 5 36- 1 608

Buontalenti, one of the leading Florentine architects of the sixteenth
century, was also distinguished as a sculptor and painter. He built
the villa of Pratolino and carried on the planning of the Boboli gar-
den. His other works in Florence are : the fafades of the Palazzi
Strozzi and Riccardi, the Palazzo Acciajuoli (now Corsini), the corridor
leading from the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace, and the casino behind
San Marco. At Siena, Buontalenti built the Palazzo Reale, and
at Pisa, the Loggia de' Banchi.

CAMPORESI (PIETRO)
B. , d. 1 781

Camporesi, a Roman architect, is mentioned as working with " Moore
of Rome " on the grounds of the Villa Borghese.

CARLONE

Several brothers of this name lived in Genoa between 1550 and 1650.
They were known as sculptors, painters and gilders, and workers in
stucco. The beautiful ceiling of the church of the Santissima An-
nunziata in Genoa is known to be by one of the Carloni.

CASTELLI (CARLO)
XVII Century

Castelli, who completed the facade of Santa Maria alia Porta, in
Milan, was an architect of the school of Maderna. With Crivelli he
laid out the gardens of the Isola Bella, near Como.

255

ARCHITECTS AND LANDSCAPE-

CASTELLO (GIOVANNI BATTISTA)

CALLED IL BERGAMASCO

1 509-1 5 79
Giovanni Castelio of Bergamo was a pupil of Alessi's and distin-
guished himself in fresco-painting and sculpture. In Genoa he re-
modelled the Palazzo Pallavicini (now Cataldi) and built the Palazzo
Imperiali. Soprani (" Vite de' Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Geno-
vesi ") says that II Bergamasco was court-architect to Philip 11 of
Spain and worked on the Escorial. Bryan, in his Dictionary of
Painters and Engravers, states that II Bergamasco was employed on
the Prado by Charles V, while his son worked for Philip II.

CRIVELLI
XVII Century

This landscape-gardener worked with Carlo Castelli on the grounds
of the Isola Bella, near Como.

FERRI (ANTONIO)
XVII Century

Ferri, a Florentine architect, built the Villa Corsini near Florence, and
remodelled the Palazzo Corsini on the Lungarno.

FONTANA (CARLO)
1634-1714

Fontana, one of the most versatile and accomplished architects of his
day, was born at Bruciato, near Milan. He was called to Rome as
architect of St. Peter's, and collaborated with Bernini on several
occasions. In Rome he built the palace of Monte Citorio, the facade
of San Marcello, and the Palazzo Torlonia. As a villa-architect his
most famous creation is the Garden Palace of Prince Liechtenstein in
Vienna. He built the palace on the Isola Bella, and the Villa Chigi,
at Cetinale, near Siena, is also attributed to him. He was the author
of works on the Vatican and on the antiquities of Rome.

FONTANA (GIOVANNI)
1 546-1614

Giovanni Fontana, of Melide, near Lugano, excelled in everything
relating to hydraulic work. At the Villa Borghese in Rome, and

256

GARDENERS MENTIONED

in the principal villas at Frascati (Aldobrandini, Taverna, Mondragone),
he introduced original designs for the waterworks. In Rome he built
the Palazzi Giustiniani and de' Gori, and made the design for the
Fontana dell' Acqua Paola, though he did not live to carry it out.

FRIGIMELICA (COUNT GIROLAMO)

XVIII Century

Count Frigimelica, an accomplished Venetian nobleman, built the
church of S. Gaetano at Vicenza, and collaborated with Prati in the
construction of the Villa Pisani at Stra.

JUVARA (FILIPPO)

1685-1735

Juvara, the most original and interesting Italian architect of the eigh-
teenth century, was a pupil of Carlo Fontana's. His most important
work is the church of the Superga near Turin, and his principal build-
ings are found in or near Turin : among them being the hunting-lodge
of Stupinigi and the churches of Santa Cristina and Santa Maria in
Carmine. The church of San Filippo in Turin was rebuilt by Juvara,
and the royal villa at Rivoli, as well as other villas in the environs
of Turin, show his hand. He remodelled the Palazzo Madama in
Rome ; at Lucca he finished the Palazzo Reale ; at Mantua the dome
on the church of S. Andrea is by him, and in Lisbon and Madrid,
respectively, he built the royal palaces.

LE NOTRE (ANDRE)
161 3-1 700

Le Notre, the greatest of French landscape-gardeners, first studied
painting under Simon Vouet, together with Mignard, Lebrun and
Lesueur, then succeeded his father as superintendent of the royal
gardens. Among his great works are the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte,
at Sceaux, at Chantilly, and the cascades and park at Saint-Cloud.
The park of Versailles, the gardens of the Trianon, of Clagny and
of Marly, are considered his masterpieces. When he visited Italy
he remodelled the grounds of the Villa Ludovisi. He was fre-
quently consulted by the Elector of Brandenburg and other notable
foreigners.

'&'

257

ARCHITECTS AND LANDSCAPE-

LIGORIO (PIRRO)
1493-1580

Ligorio, the Neapolitan architect, was also distinguished as antiquary,
sculptor and engineer; he worked much in sgraffiti. He built the
beautiful Villa Pia in the Vatican gardens, and the Villa d'Este at
Tivoli, and made additions to the Vatican. The Library in Turin
possesses his numerous manuscripts, some of which have been pub-
lished. His best-known works are "An Attempt to Restore Ancient
Rome" and "The Restoration of Hadrian's Villa," the plates for which
were engraved on copper by Francesco Contini in 1751.

LIPPI (ANNIBALE)

B. , d. 1581

Lippi is generally said to have been the son of Nanni di Baccio Bigio,
the architect and sculptor, though some biographers declare them to
have been the same person. Assuming Lippi to have had a separate
identity, only two of his works are known : the church of S. Maria di
Loreto, near Spoleto, and the Villa Medici in Rome. His fame rests
on the latter, which became the model of the Roman viaisoti de
plaisance.

LONGHENA (BALDASSARE)

1 604- 1 682

Longhena, the most distinguished architect of the late Renaissance in
Venetia, gave all his time and work to his native city. Among the
buildings he erected there are : S. Maria della Salute, S. Maria ai Scalzi,
the Ospedaletto, the cloister and staircase in San Giorgio Maggiore,
the Palazzo Pesaro, and the Palazzo Rezzonico (now Zelinsky).

LUNGHI OR LONGHI (MARTINO) THE ELDER
XVI Century

Lunghi, born at Viggiu in the Milanese, in the second half of
the sixteenth century, built the Villa Mondragone at Frascati, in
1567, for Cardinal Marco d'Altemps. The villa was enlarged by
Gregory VH, and later by Paul V and his nephew, Cardinal Scipione
Borghese.

258

GARDENERS MENTIONED

MARCHIONNE (CARLO)

I 704- 1 780

Marchionne was the architect of the Villa Albani near Rome, built
ill 1746.

MICHELANGELO (SIMONE BUONARROTI)
1475-1564

The great architect, sculptor and painter, was born in Florence, where
he built the Laurentian Library and the chapel of S. Lorenzo, with
the cupola of the sacristy. In Rome he built the Palazzo de' Con-
servatorii on the Capitoline hill, the cornice of the Palazzo Earnese,
the Porta del Popolo and the Porta Pia. His model for the dome of
St. Peter's was carried out except as to the lantern. Tradition assigns
to him the Villa ai Collazzi (now Bombicci) near Florence.

MONTORSOLI (FRA GIOVANNI ANGELO)

1507-1563

Fra Giovanni Montorsoli, a Florentine monk of the Servile Order, was
a sculptor, and studied under Michelangelo. He was early called to
Genoa, where he decorated the church of San Matteo (the church of
the Doria family) and built the famous villa in the harbour for the
Admiral Andrea Doria. The Villa Imperiali, at San Fruttuoso, near
Genoa, is also attributed to Montorsoli. One of his best works is the
high altar in the church of the Servi at Bologna.

MOORE (JACOB)

1 740-1 793
Moore, a Scotch landscape-painter — known as " Moore of Rome " —
was patronized by Prince Borghese, and remodelled the grounds of
the Villa Borghese in the style of the jardin anglais.

MORA

XVII Century

A Roman engineer of the name built some of the waterworks on the
Isola Bella, near Como, in the seventeenth century.

NOLLI (ANTONIO)

XVIII Century

Nolli laid out the grounds of the Villa Albani near Rome, in 1746.

259

ARCHITECTS AND LANDSCAPE-

NOLLI (PIETRO)
XVIII Century

Pietro Nolli is also mentioned as one of the landscape-gardeners who
laid out the Villa Albani.

OLIVIERI (ORAZIO) OF TIVOLI
XVI Century

Olivieri was employed as an engineer of the waterworks at the Villa
d'Este at Tivoli and the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati.

PALLADIO (ANDREA)
1 508-1 580

Palladio, the great Venetian architect, was born at Vicenza. He
turned the development of Italian Renaissance architecture in the
direction of pure classicalism, and was a master of proportion in build-
ing. At Vicenza he rebuilt the Sala della Ragione, and built the
Palazzi Tiene and Valmarana and the Teatro Olimpico ; while the
Villa Capra or Rotonda, near Vicenza, is his work, and also the Villa
Giacomelli at Maser. In Venice he erected the churches of San
Giorgio Maggiore and II Redentore, also the Villa Malcontenta near
Fusina on the Brenta. Palladio published a " Treatise on Archi-
tecture " and "The Antiquities of Rome."

PARIGI (GIULIO)
B. , d. 1635

Parigi was a Florentine architect, engineer and designer. As far as is
known, he worked entirely in Florence and its environs. He is the
architect of the court and arcade of Poggio Imperiale, the cloister of
S. Agostino, the Palazzo Marucelli (now Fenci), the Palazzo Scarlatti,
and a part of the Ufifizi.

PERUZZI (BALDASSARE)

1481-1537

Peruzzi, who was both architect and painter, di\-ided his time between

Rome and Siena, where he was born. He built the Villa Vicobello

260

GARDENERS MENTIONED

near Siena, as well as that of Belcaro. The well-known Palazzo
Massimi alle Colonne in Rome is his work, also the Villa Trivulzio
near Rome.

PIRANESI (GIOVANNI BATTISTA)
1 720-1 778

Piranesi, the famous Venetian etcher and engraver, was specially
noted for his etchings of famous buildings, and has been called " The
Rembrandt of Architecture." He was also an architect, and worked
on the church of S. Maria del Popolo in Rome. While there he
also remodelled the chapel of the Priory of the Knights of Malta, and
probably laid out the grounds. Piranesi published over twenty folio
volumes of engravings and etchings.

PONZIO (FLAMINIO)

1575-1620

Ponzio, a Lombard architect, built the loggia of the Villa Mondragone

at Frascati, and the Palazzo Sciarra, and finished the Borghese Chapel

in the church of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome.

PORTA (GIACOMO BELLA)
1541-1604

Delia Porta, a Milanese architect, was a pupil of Vignola's. His great
work was the finishing of the dome of St. Peter's in Rome, in doing
which he followed Michelangelo's plan, but improved the curve. His
other works in Rome were: the churches of II Gesu, S. Luigi de'
Francesi, S. Catarina de' Funari, the Palazzo Paluzzi, the facade of
the Palazzo Chigi, the famous fountains in the Piazza d'Araceli and
the Piazza Navona (for which Bernini supplied the sculpture), and the
Fontana delle Tartarughe. In Genoa he finished the church of the
S. S. Annunziata, and he was employed on the Villa d'Este at Tivoli
and the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati.

PRATI
XVIII Century

Prati collaborated with Count Frigimelica in building the Villa Pisani,
at Stra near Venice, in the eighteenth century.

261

ARCHITECTS AND LANDSCAPE-

RAINALDI (GIROLAMO)
1570-1655

Rainaldi was a Roman and his principal works are in Rome. He
planned the church of S. Agnese; built the fafade of S. Andrea della
Valle, the fa9ade of S. Maria in Campitelli, and the Palazzo Pamphily
on the Piazza Navona. He added two pavilions to the Farnesina,
and designed the grounds of the Villa Borghese and the gardens of
the Villa Mondragone at Frascati. In Bologna he built the church of
S. Lucia.

RAPHAEL SANZIO
1483-1520
Raphael succeeded Bramante as chief architect of St. Peter's. His
most important villa is the famous Villa Madama near Rome. The
Farnesina in Rome was built by him, and he laid out the gardens
of the Vatican. His other works in Rome are the Palazzo CafTarelli
(now Stoppani) and the Capella Chigi. In Florence he designed the
fagades of the church of San Lorenzo and of the Palazzo Pandolfini
(now Nencini).

REPTON (HUMPHREY)
1752-1818

Repton, who was born at Bury St. Edmunds, began life as a mer-
chant, but having failed in his business, became a landscape-gardener.
He published " Observations on Landscape Gardening " (1803), and is
the best-known successor of " Capability Brown " in the naturalistic
style of gardening.

ROMANO (GIULIO DEI GIANNUZZI — ALSO CALLED

GIULIO PIPPI)

1492-1546

As Raphael's pupil, Giulio Romano painted the architectural back-
grounds of Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican, and this led to his
studying architecture. His masterpiece is the Palazzo del Te at
Mantua, where he also built a part of the Palazzo Ducale. He car-
ried out Raphael's decorations in the Villa Madama.

262

GARDENKRS MENTIONED

RUGGIERI (ANTONIO MARIA)
XVIII Century

Ruggieri built the Villa Alario (now Visconti di Saliceto) on the Navi-
glio near Milan, and the fafade of the church of S. Firenze in Flor-
ence. He also remodelled the interior of Santa Felicita in Florence,
and in Milan he built the Palazzo Cusani.

SANGALLO (ANTONIO GIAMBERTI DA)
^ 1455-1534

Antonio da Sangallo was a brother of Giuliano, and famous as a
carver of crucifixes. He altered Hadrian's tomb in Rome into the
Castle of St. Angelo, and laid out a part of the Vatican gardens.
The church of the Madonna di S. Biagio in Montepulciano and the
fortress of Civita Castellana were built by him.

SANGALLO, THE YOUNGER (ANTONIO CORDIANI DA)

1483-1546

This Sangallo was a nephew of the other Antonio, and a pupil of
Bramante's. After Raphael's death he became the leading architect
of St. Peter's. The fortress at Civita Vecchia is his work. In Rome
he planned the outer gardens of the Vatican and built the right-hand
chapel in S. Giacomo degli Spagnuoli, the beautiful Palazzo Mar-
chionne Baldassini, the Palazzo Sacchetti, and the greater part of the
Palazzo Farnese.

SANGALLO (GIULIANO GIAMBERTI DA)

1445-1516

Giuliano da Sangallo, the Florentine architect, was also noted as an
engineer and a carver in wood. His great work is the villa at Poggio
a Caiano near Florence, with a hall having the widest ceiling then
known. He also built the Villa Petraia at Castello, near Florence,
and in or near Florence the sacristy and cloister of San Spirito, the
cloister for the Frati Eremitani di S. Agostino, and the villa of
Poggio Imperiale. Among his other works are : the Palazzo Rovere
near San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome, and the Palazzo Rovere at
Savona. Sangallo also constructed many fortresses. After Bra-
mante's death he worked with Raphael on St. Peter's.

263

ARCHITECTS AND LANDSCAPE-

SANSOVINO (JACOPO TATTI)

1487-1570

Sansovino, though a Florentine by birth, worked principally in Venice.
He was equally distinguished as sculptor and architect. In the latter
capacity he built in Venice the Zecca or Mint, the Loggietta, the Pa-
lazzo Cornaro, the Palazzo Corner della Ca Grande, the Scala d'Oro
in the Doge's palace, the churches of San Martino and San Fantino,
and his masterpiece, the Library of San Marco. In Rome the Palazzo
Gaddi (now Nicolini) was built by him.

SAVING (DOMENICO)

XVIII Century

Savino is mentioned among the landscape-gardeners who remodelled
the grounds of the Villa Borghese.

TITO (SANTI DI) OF FLORENCE

1 5 36- 1 603

Santi di Tito of Florence was known as an historical painter, and also
as a builder of villas at Casciano and Monte Oliveto. An octagonal
villa at Peretola was built by him, and he did some decorative work in
the Villa Pia. In Florence he built the Palazzo Dardinelli.

IL TRIBOLO (NICCOLO PERICOLI)
1485-1550

II Tribolo, the Florentine sculptor, studied under Sansovino. He be-
came known for his beautiful designs in tile-work, of which the Villa
Castello near Florence shows many examples. He collaborated with
Ammanati in laying out the Boboli garden, and the great grotto at
Castello is his work.

UDINE (GIOVANNI DA)

1487-1564

Giovanni da Udine, born, as his name indicates, in the chief city of
the province of Friuli, was one of the most celebrated decorative
artists of his day. He studied under Giorgione and Raphael, and
became noted for his stained glass and for the invention of a stucco

264

GARDENERS MENTIONED

as durable as that of the Romans. His stucco-work in the Villa Ma-
dama and in the loggias of the Vatican is famous, and part of the deco-
ration of the Borgia rooms in the Vatican is his work. Michel-
angelo's chapel of the Medici in Florence was painted and decorated
in stucco by Udine, and he carried out, in painting, some of Ra-
phael's designs for the great hall of the Farnesina. The Palazzo
Grimani in Venice and the Palazzo Massimi alle Colonne in Rome
were partly decorated by him.

VAGA (PIERIN DEL)
1500-1547

Del Vaga, whose real name was Pietro Buonaccorsi, was born near
Florence. He was a pupil of Raphael's, and after the latter's death
was employed in finishing a part of his work in the Vatican. Almost
all del Vaga's work was done in Genoa, where he painted the state
apartments in the Villa Doria. The charming plaster decorations
in the Palazzo Pallavicini (now Cataldi) are by him, and also the
Hercules cycle in the Palazzo Odero (now Mari).

VASANZIO (GIOVANNI)
B. , d. 1622

Vasanzio, known also as II Fiammingo, but whose real name was John
of Xanten, was a Flemish architect who came to Italy and had con-
siderable success in Rome. He built the Villa Borghese in Rome
and designed the fountains of the inner court of the Villa Pia. He
also worked on the Villa Mondragone at Frascati and succeeded Fla-
minio Ponzio as architect of the Palazzo Rospigliosi in Rome.

VASARI (GIORGIO)
1511-1574

Vasari, who was born at Arezzo, was a pupil of Michelangelo and
Andrea del Sarto. Though he considered himself a better painter
than architect, it is chiefly as the latter that he interests the modern
student. He built the court of the Uffizi in Florence and planned the
Villa di Papa Giulio in Rome; painted the ceiling of the great hall of
the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, and carved the figure of Architecture
on the tomb of Michelangelo in Santa Croce. He is, however, chiefly
famous for his lives of the Italian painters and architects.

265

ARCHITECTS MKNTIONED

VIGNOLA (GIACOMO BAROZZI DA)
1507-1573
Vignola, one of the greatest architects of the sixteenth century, born
at Vignola, in the province of Modena, followed Michelangelo as the
architect of St. Peter's. The Villa Lante at Bagnaia, near Viterbo,
is attributed to him. In Rome he built the celebrated Villa di Papa
Giulio, though the plan was Vasari's; also the garden-architecture of
the Orti Farnesiani on the Palatine. His masterpiece is the palace
at Caprarola, near Viterbo. He also built the great Palazzo Farnese
at Piacenza, various buildings at Bologna, and the loggia of the Villa
Mondragone at Frascati. His church of the Gesii in Rome greatly
influenced other architects. His text-book on the Orders of Archi
tecture is one of the best-known works on the subject.

266

INDEX

Acqua Sola, gardens of, 42, 53

Albani, Cardinal, 113

Albani, Villa, Pietro NoUi's work on, no;

Antonio Nolli's work on, 113
d'Albaro, San Francesco, villas at, 188
Alessi, Galeazzo: Strada Nuova, 176; Villa

Imperiali (Scassi), 179; Villa Paradiso,

189; Villa Cambiaso, 189
Algardi, Alessandro, 109
Ammanati, Bartolommeo, Boboli garden, 25 ;

Villa di Papa Giulio, 84
Anguissola, Count, 212
Arethusa, grotto of, at Villa d'Este, 147

Battaglia, castle of Cattajo at, 233

Bernini, 185

Bisuschio: Jtr Villa Cicogna

Boboli garden, 25 ; Isola Bella in, 29

Bologna, Giovanni da, 37; figure of the
Apennines, 57

Bombicci, Villa, 53

Borghese, Cardinal Scipione, 148

Borghese, Villa, 107

Borromean Islands, 197

Borromeo, Cardinal Charles, 201

Borromeo, Count Vitaliano IV, 198

Borromini, 163

Botanic Garden at Padua, 239

Bramante: Vatican gardens, 81 ; double stair-
case in the Vatican, 97

Brenta, the, 233, 243

Brown, "Capability," 205

Brunswick, Caroline of, 184

Buonaccorsi : see Vaga

Buontalenti, 25

Burnet, Bishop: description of Isola Bella,
201

Cadenabbia, 214

Cafaggiuolo, Villa, 30

Caffe at the Villa Albani, 114

Cagnola, Villa, 219

Cambiaso, Villa, 189

Cambiaso, Villa : see Paradiso

Campi, Villa, 54

Campiobbi, 48

Camporesi, 108

Canopus, \'alley of, at Villa of Hadrian, 148

Capra, Villa, at Vicenza, 246

Caprarola, 97; Vignola's casino, 131 ; chdteaii
d^eau, 131

Careggi, Villa, 30

Carloni, the : statue of Neptune in Villa
Doria, 175

Carlotta, Villa, at Cadenabbia, 214

Casino of the Aurora, 1 19

Casino del Papa : see Villa Pia

Castelli : terraces on the Isola Bella, 19S

Castello, Giovanni Battista, 173

Castello, Villa, 30

Cattajo, castle of, 233

Cecchignola, hunting-lodge of, 1 19

Celiniontana, Villa, 119

Cctinale, Villa, 64; hermitage at, 66

Chateaux iVeau at the Villa Aldobrandini, 152 ;
Villa Borghese, 107; Caprarola, 131; Villa
Cicogna, 217; Palazzo Colonna, 119; Villa
Conti, 155; Villa d'Este at Tivoli, 144;
Villa Lante, 136; Lancellotti, 164; Mon-
dragone, 151; Val San Zibio, 237

Chigi, Flavio, 6J

Chigi, Villa, 117

Cicogna, Villa, 214; cluiteau d'eau, 217

Clement VII: see Medici, Giuliano de'

Colonna, Cardinal, 83

267

INDEX

Colonna, Palazzo, Il8; chateau d^au, 119
Como, villa of Bishop of, 213
Conti, Villa: see Torlonia
Cordova, Cardinal Bishop ofj 140
Corsini, Villa, 48
Crivelli, Villa, near Inverigo, 218
Crivelli ; work on the Isola Bella, 198
Cuzzano, Villa, 250

Danti, Villa, 48, 57
De' Gori, Villa: see Palazzina, La
Durazzo-Grapollo, Villa, 186
Dussieux, no

Este, Cardinal Ippolito d', 140

Este, Villa d', at Cernobbio, 20S

Este, Villa d', at TivoH, 139; grotesque
garden-architecture, 29 ; Ligorio's work,
140; frescoes of the Zuccheri, 143

Evelyn, description of Villa Medici, 89 ; of
Villa Doria, 175

Falconieri, Villa, 160

Farnese, Cardinal Alexander, 127

Farnese gardens, 97

Ferrara, Alfonso I of, 140

Ferri, Antonio, 48

Fontana, Carlo : Cetinale, 65 ; palace and
garden-pavilions on the Isola Bella, 198

Fontana, Giovanni: Villa Borghese, 107;
theatre d'eau at Mondragone, 151 ; water-
works at the Villa Aldobrandini, 152

Fonte air Erta, 51

Frascati, jeux d\'aitx in villas, 107; char-
acteristic features of villas, 139

Gallio, Cardinal, 184
Gambara, Cardinal, 132
Gamberaia, Villa, 45
Garden, Botanic, at Padua, 239
Garden-house at Caprarola, 131
Garden-house at Stra, 244
Gardens :

Acqua Sola, 185

Boboli, 25

Farnese, 97

Florentine, English influence on, 21

Genoese, characteristics of, 178

Giusti, 250

Pigna, 82

Vatican, 98

Genoa, villas of, 173
Giacomelli, Villa, 249
Giulio, Villa di Papa, 84
Giusti gardens, 250
Giustiniani, Villa, 174

Grotto at Villa Castello, 34 ; at Villa d'Este,
147 ; at Villa Gamberaia, 45

Hermitage at Cetinale, 66

Imperial;, Villa, at Sampierdarena : see Villa

Scassi
Imperiali, Villa, at San Fruttuoso, 190
Isola Bella, Lake of Como, 198; Bishop

Burnet's description of, 201
Isola Bella in Boboli garden, 29
Isola Madre, Lake of Como, 197

Julius III, 84
Juvara, 231

Lancellotti, Villa, 164

Lante, Villa, 132; chateau d'eau, 136; gar-
dens, 97

Le Notre, no, 139

Ligorio, Pirro, 98; Casino del Papa, 98;
Villa d'Este at Tivoli, 140

Lippi, Annibale, 90

Lomellini, Villa, 174

Longhena, 232

Ludovisi, Villa, 119

Maison de plaisance, the, 22

Malcontenta, Villa della, 245

Malta, Villa of the Knights of, 117

Marchionne, Carlo, 113

Mattel, Villa, 119

Medici, Eleonora de', 25

Medici, Giuliano de' (Clement VII), 82

Medici, Villa, 89

Michelangelo: Villa Bombicci, 53; Villa di

Papa Giulio, 84
Modena, Villa of Duke of, at Varese, 224
Mondragone, 97; work by Flaminio Ponzio,

148; Vignola's loggia, 151; Giovanni

Fontana's thedtye d'eau, 151
Montaigne : description of Castello, ^^
Montalto, Cardinal, 132
Montorsoli, Fra, 174
Moore, Jacob, 108
Mora, 1 98
Muti, Villa, 159

268

INDEX

Naples, King of, 83
Negroni, Villa, 119
NoUi, Antonio, 113
Nolli, Pietro, iio

Olivieri, Orazio, 147

Padua, Botanic Garden, 239 ; Prato della

Valle, 240
Palazzina, La, 71 ; theatre ai, 72
Palladio, 180, 232
Pallavicini, Villa, at Pegli, 185
Pallavicini alle Peschiere, Villa, 185, iSo
Palmieri, Villa, 57

Pamphily, Villa, 109; theatre ii'tati, no
Papa, Casino del : see Villa Pia
Papa Giulio, Villa di, 84
Paradisino, Villa, 1S9
Paradiso, Villa, 189
Parigi, Giulio, 38
I':irma, Duchess of, 83
I'arodi, Palazzo, 177
Peruzzi, Baldassare, at Belcaro, 63 ; at Vico-

bello, 69
Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 38
Petraia, Villa, 30; fountain at, 37
Pia, Villa, 140
Pigna, Giardino della, 82
Piranesi, 117
Pisani, Alvise, 243
Pisani, Villa, at Stra, 244
Pius IV, 98
Pliniana, Villa, 212
Poggio a Caiano, 30
Poggio Imperiale, 38
Ponzio, Flaminio, 148
Porta, Giacomo della, 144 ; Villa Aldobran-

dini, 151
Prati, 243

Pratolino, Villa, 30, 57
Priorato, II : see Villa of the Knights of

Malta
Pulci, Castel, 57

Rainaldo, Girolamo, 107

Raphael, 82

Repton, Humphrey, 205

Riario, Cardinal, 132

Ridolfi, Cardinal, 132

Romano, Giulio, 82

Rotonda Cagnola : see Cagnola

Rotonda Capra ; see Capra
Rubens, 176
Ruffini, Cardinal, 163
Ruggieri, 223

Sacchetti, Villa, 119

Sampierdarena, ^%

Saiigallo, Antonio da, 82 ; A. da Sangallo the

Vounger, 104
Sangallo, Giuliano da, 38, 82
Sansovino, 232
Savino, 107
Scassi, Villa, 179
Sixtus V, 132
Stri, Villa Pisani at, 244
Strada Nuova in Genoa, 176

Tiepolo: Villa Pisani, 244; Villa Valmarana,

249
Tito, Santi di, 53
Torlonia, Villa, 155
Tribolo, II: Boboli garden, 25 ; fountain at

Castello, 33 ; at Petraia, 37

Udine, Giovanni da, 83

Vaga, Pierin del, 173
Valmarana, Villa, 249
Val San Zibio, Villa of, 237
Vasanzio, Giovanni (II Fiammingo), 107
Vasari, 84

Vatican, gardens of, 81
Venetia, villa-architecture of, 232
Vigna del Papa: see Villa di Papa Giulio
Vignola : Villa di Papa Giulio, 84; Farnese
gardens, 97; Caprarola, 131; loggia at
Mondragone, 151
Villa:

Ai CoUazzi: see Bombicci

Alario : see Visconti di Saliceto

Albani, no, 113

Aldobrandini, 151

Belcaro, 63

Belrespiro: see Pamphily

Bombicci, 53

Borghese, 107

Cafaggiulo, 30

Cagnola, 219

Cambiaso (Paradiso), 189

Cambiaso, by Alessi, 189

Campi, 54

Capponi at Arcetri, 4S

269

INDEX

Villa:

Capra, 246

Caprarola, 97

Careggi, 30

Carlotta, 214

Castel Pulci, 57

Celimontana, iig

Cetinale, 64

Chigi, ri7

Cicogna, 214

Conti : see Torlonia

Corsini, 48

Crivelli, 218

Cuzzano, 250

Danti, 48, 57

De' Gori : see Palazzina, La

Doria in Genoa, 175

Durazzo-GrapoUo, 186

d'Este at Cernobbio, 184

d'Este at Tivoli, 139

Falconieri, 160

Fonte air Erta, 51

Gamberaia, 41

Giacoraelli, 249

Giustiniani, 174

Imperiali at San Fruttuoso, 190

Imperiali : see Scassi

Isola Bella, 198

Lancellotti, 164

Lante, 97

Lappeggi, 57

Lomellini, 174

Ludovisi, 119

Madama, 82

Malcontenta, 245

Malta, of the Knights of, 117

Medici, 89

Mondragone, 97

Villa:

Muti, 159

Negroni, 119

Palazzina, La, 71

Pallavicini at Pegli, 185

Pallavicini alle Peschiere, 185

Palmieri, 57

Pamphily, 109

di Papa Giulio, 84

Paradisino, 189

Paradiso : see Cambiaso

Petraia, 30

Pia, 140

Pisani, 244

Pliniana, 212

Poggio a Caiano, 30

Poggio Imperiale, 30

Pratolino, 57

Priorato, del : see Malta

Rotonda : see Cagnola and Capra

Sacchetti, 119

Scassi, 179

Torlonia, 155

Valmarana, 249

Val San Zibio, 237

Vicobello, 69

Visconti di Saliceto, 220
Vi//i2 subiirbana, the, 22

Villas of the Brenta, 240 ; of the Brianza,
218; Florentine, 19; Genoese, 173; Mila-
nese, 197; Roman, 81; Sienese, 63; Ve-
netian, 231
Vismara, 198

Xanten, John of : see Vasanzio

Zocchi, etchings by, ^:i
Zuccheri, the, 85, 143

270

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